This morning my OS hard drive died. It seemed to be running fine until a restart. After a couple troubleshooting techniques failed, I decided to try booting with my OS back up [made with SuperDuper]. The start up went fine and I was then able to use two different disc utilities to confirm the worst case: drive failure [well, it's better than logic board failure…].

I purchased and installed a replacement drive; booted from my OS clone; formatted the new drive; launched SuperDuper and copied the data onto it. I rebooted on completion and was up and running. [NOTE: Selecting "Restart from..." under 'On successful completion' in the General Options pane allows you to walk away and return to the newly copied OS up and running]. The entire process would theoretically have taken less than an hour if I had a spare [internal] drive handy. How's that for minimizing downtime?

Look, THINGS HAPPEN & HARDWARE FAILS; often without warning. MY ADVICE: GET SUPERDUPER, A PORTABLE HARD DRIVE [I prefer OWC's Mercury On-The-Go 2.5" drives], AND GIVE YOURSELF A SAFETY NET FOR A RAINY DAY. If you rely on your Mac for important endeavors, it makes no sense not to have a [current] bootable OS clone. All app updates are free and the support is superb as well. SuperDuper is well worth the $27.95 price tag, especially when you consider the value of your time.