How do I clone restore a rMBP?

[Village Idiot]

I'm taking my retina Macbook Pro to the Apple store and just incase it needs to be replaced, I'd like to make an image of the internal SSD that I can reload on to a new one should that happen. How do I go about doing this?

I've made images on to external drives before, but I've never restore the OEM drive from one of those images. Is there a site that explains how to do this?

Right now I have an OS X partition, a Windows partition, and a restore partition.

 

[BuCkDoG]

There is no explanation on how to do this I believe on the web, but what I would do is just backup to an external drive if you have on just to make your life easier.

 

[Kaido]

A very easy way is to create a USB boot stick & make a clone of your hard drive. The USB boot stick is simply a copy of the OSX installer on a bootable USB flash drive. Are you on Mavericks? You can download it for free from the Mac App Store:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-mavericks/id675248567

Then use DiskMaker X to create a bootable USB stick: (minimum 8GB needed)

http://liondiskmaker.com/

Then clone your rMBP's internal SSD to a disk image using SuperDuper:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

If anything goes wrong, you can boot up to the OSX installer using the USB stick, then use Disk Utility to restore the disk image you made of the SSD. For convenience, you can use a larger USB hard drive instead of a USB stick - that would give you enough space to keep both the bootable OSX install & your SSD clone on one device, so you can simply boot up to the USB drive and then select your image without having to plug anything else in. Easy peasy.

 

[Kaido]

Some instructions on DiskMaker X here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/1...otable-os-x-10-9-mavericks-usb-install-drive/

 

[CA19100]

I'll echo the recommendation of SuperDuper; it's a very easy way to make a perfect clone of your drive. It's shareware for the "smart" mode, but free for a full cloning, which is what you want here.