Cloning a hard drive is when you create an exact copy of one drive's contents to another, which has been made quite simple with the availability of high-capacity external drives, simple connectivity, and highly developed cloning software. Many troubleshooting guides include recommendations for "cloning" your system's boot drive. Various MacFixIt articles references this, and it is advocated in discussion forums and other places as an alternate means of backing up the hard drive before performing system maintenance, system alterations, or software upgrades.
