Step four:#Uls#lw#xs#dqg#vwduw#djdlq
Erasing a whole drive is possible, but you’ll need a backup
W
HEN YOU FEEL like your Mac
is hopelessly cluttered, it
might seem easier to delete
everything and start from scratch
than work out what to remove. If all
your work, photos and other content
was in iCloud, you could theoretically
just erase your Macintosh HD, reinstall
macOS, then let everything sync back.
In reality, it’s never that neat, and
you’ll need to ensure that you don’t
lose any data.
One approach would be to manually
copy all of your own content to an
external drive, erase your startupdrive and reinstall macOS (see step 1
of “Restore files after reinstalling
macOS”, opposite), then copy
everything back. Time Machine (see
page 20) can make this more foolproof.SAME AGAIN
In System Preferences > Time
Machine, check that you have a
complete up–to–date backup stored on
your external drive. Click Options to
check that you haven’t excluded
anything from the backup. Then
follow one of the processes shown
opposite, either to restore the wholebackup or to reinstall macOS and then
selectively restore content.
Restoring everything isn’t logically
going to save any room, so the most
likely time to resort to this is if your
drive is not just full, but behaving
oddly — perhaps losing space for no
reason, or refusing to free up space
even after emptying the Trash. Tr y
Disk Utility to check and repair the
drive before resorting to this.BELT AND BRACES
We really can’t emphasize this too
much: unless you have a good reason
to take drastic action, don’t. If you do
go for a reinstall, remember that once
you erase your drive, the only copy of
your crucial files, until you restore
them, is your backup — which is the
same as not having a backup.
If your work is synced to iCloud
Drive, that will serve as an extra
backstop. (And don’t worry, although
the act of manually deleting a synced
file would delete it from iCloud Drive
too, erasing your whole drive leaves
your iCloud Drive intact, ready to sync
back.) If not, try to make a separate
copy of anything important elsewhere.Drive cloning
>>> Duplicating a whole drive
is another way to get a copy
that you can restore cleanly
after erasing or keep as a backup. You
can copy a drive to an empty one
using Disk Utility’s Restore function
(see bit.ly/apple-diskutil restore) or
create a disk image from it on another
drive (see bit.ly/apple-diskutilcreate).But any corruption may be duplicated,
and there are complications to
imaging startup drives. Third–party
utilities such as Carbon Copy Cloner
(see bombich.com) may be preferable.Image rights from top to bottom: Apple, Bombich.
Feature
26 APR 2020 maclife.com