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How to clone or backup macOS in another bootable drive

As I need to do various Hackintosh testing in my macOS partition of my PC, and since the macOS Mojave is my main work partition, in case of failures, I need to be up and running in no time. So I installed another drive on my PC, and here's the process to copy all the contents and make it bootable.
  1. After physically installing the SATA HDD, SSD or M.2 drive on your computer and confirm it works, boot to your Hackintosh.
  2. From Spotlight, type Disk Utility and hit Enter.
  3. From the View menu, enable Show All Devices.
  4. Select the new drive for cloning from the list on the left, and click on Erase.
  5. Name it something that you will be able to tell it apart from your primary drive. I named it Clone.
  6. From the Format drop down, select APFS.
  7. From the Scheme drop down, select GUID Partition Map.
  8. Click Erase.
  9. While still in Disk Utility, and selecting again your Clone drive from the left list, click on Partition.
  10. Click the + button to make a new partition. Drag to make a small partition (about 500MB should do it) and name it EFI.
  11. From the Format select MS-DOS (FAT), and click Apply.
  12. Download and Install the Carbon Copy Cloner trial from here.
  13. Open CCC from Launchpad and from the Source section select the startup volume (APFS) that has your macOS. 
  14. From the Destination section select the Clone (APFS) volume you just created. 
  15. Click Clone. This will take a while depending on the size of your stuff.
  16. While it's doing that, open Clover Configurator and from the left side, click on Mount EFI.
  17. Find the EFI on APFS Container partition (macOS, Preboot, Recovery, VM) partition and click on Mount Partition.
  18. Click on Open Partition.
  19. From here, on the left side, right-click on the other EFI partition you just created on the Clone drive (you might need to scroll a bit, you will find it under Locations) and click Open in New Tab.
  20. From the previous EFI tab, right-click on the EFI folder and click Copy.
  21. Navigate to the Clone EFI tab and Paste the folder there.
  22. After the Carbon Copy Cloner is done, Restart the computer.
  23. Press F12 to bring up the Boot menu. Select the Clone hard drive to boot from.
  24. From the Clover menu, use the arrow buttons to navigate to the "Boot macOS from Clone" and hit Enter.
  25. From the Apple icon on the top bar, go to About this Mac. You should see the startup drive is the clone.

Disclaimer: The content provided in this article is for informational purposes only. You are solely responsible for verifying the information as being appropriate for your personal use.
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