[Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from, a new book for Mac users who want to travel beyond the basics. To learn more about the book!] It’s a good idea to have a bootable emergency drive on hand, just in case disaster strikes your Mac. An emergency drive (also referred to as an OS X Recovery Disk) can help you repair the hard disk, reinstall the operating system, and restore from a Time Machine backup to get your computer back fast. With previous versions of OS X, you could have used the installation DVD to fix problems. But OS X Mountain Lion is sold in the App Store as a digital download — no physical disk is provided. What’s a maintenance-minded Mac user to do? Create your own bootable OS X USB drive, of course!

It’s easy, and if you’ve already purchased OS X and have a USB drive that’s 1 GB or larger, it’s completely free. Carry it in your pocket or put it on your keychain so it’s available if the worst-case scenario occurs.

And other countries. S photo editor for mac. Mac App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. ​ Skylum ® is a registered trademark in USA and other countries.

You’ll thank yourself for taking the time to complete this project. Evaluating Your Emergency Drive Options It can happen to any of us, even those who own brand-new Macs. First your computer starts freezing infrequently, then crashing more often, and then it won’t start at all.

Imaging On A Mac I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make backup images on my. If you want to make an offline backup, you need to boot to another OSX install. Image of entire Mac can be created by Disk utility, which is an inbuilt feature of Mac OS X. Follow these steps:-1. Go to Applications > Utilities 2. From the File menu, select New > Disk Image from Folder. Select the Drive, click the New Image button 4. Choose the destination where you want to store your image 5.

For situations like this, you need an emergency drive on hand to start up your computer and troubleshoot the problem. • Emergency USB Drive: Creating a bootable USB drive is your safest bet. This device is self-contained and kept entirely separate from your computer — and any potential problems associated with it. But if you don’t want to create a USB drive, you may have access to two other types of emergency drives, depending on when you purchased your Mac. • Recovery HD: Every Mac running OS X Lion and later has a hidden Recovery HD partition that can be used to boot the computer and repair the hard disk.

(To use the Recovery HD partition as your startup disk, hold down Command-R at startup or, if that doesn’t work, option.) But the Recovery HD probably won’t work if the internal hard drive is damaged. When you can’t boot from the regular startup disk, chances are you won’t be able to boot from the Recovery HD either. • Internet Recovery: Macs purchased after OS X Lion was released have an additional feature called Internet Recovery, which works even if your internal hard drive is damaged. If there’s a problem with your computer, it can network-boot from Apple’s servers. First, your computer’s memory and hard drive are checked for major issues. Dvd case template for mac free download. If none are found, your Mac downloads and boots from a Recovery HD image. But even if your Mac has this feature, you’ll still benefit from having an emergency drive, as it can take a while to download the Recovery HD partition.