Cloning Backup harddrive

[MacEnigma]

What a fantastic day!
Thank you to all mac geniuses out there for making our lives easier!

- Does anybody know how to clone an external hard drive with a Mac time machine backup on?

My girlfriend's Mac broke down yesterday. In the store, they say there are some system files that are broken (I don't know how they can just break). To get the computer working again they want to reinstall it.

I made a backup of her computer a couple of months back and I'd like to use that now. The problem is that I'm on Malta and she is Poland. I could naturally send the hard drive to her, but our experience of external hard drives have taught us that they are very sensitive.

I have two alternatives:
1. Send the hard drive by regular post to her.
2. Somehow upload the backup to Dropbox so they can download and create a new hard drive in Poland.

In any case, the first thing I'd like to do is to clone the hard drive to guarantee that we always have one backup working.
- Does anybody know how to clone an external hard drive with a Mac time machine backup on?
- Is it possible to upload a backup to Dropbox?

 

[Weaselboy]

- Does anybody know how to clone an external hard drive with a Mac time machine backup on?

Just use the "restore" feature of Disk Utility to restore one drive to the other and that is essentially a clone.

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/restore-a-disk-dskutl14062/mac

- Is it possible to upload a backup to Dropbox?

You could use Disk Utility to make a disk image (DMG) file of the disk. That is sort of like a ZIP file. That would put the entire drive contents into that one file. Then upload that DMG file somewhere where she could download it. Then she could use the DMG file to restore the drive contents to another disk.

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/create-a-disk-image-dskutl11888/mac