Can I swap the SSDs between two MBP late 2013's to recover data?

[munderwood14]

So my sisters MBP late 2013 has given up, apple say the logic board is defective. I happen to have a MBP late 2013 as well so assume it will be ok to temporarily swap the SSDs, boot up into the os and dump the data onto my network drive? Do apple have any firmware quirks etc that try to prevent you from doing this? The working machine has macOS Mojave installed and the drive to be recovered has Big Sur installed, could this cause a problem without updating?



Please excuse my ignorance, I'm used to dealing with computers with a more traditional bios setup and want to avoid bricking the working MBP!



Cheers, Matt

 

[cmaier]

So my sisters MBP late 2013 has given up, apple say the logic board is defective. I happen to have a MBP late 2013 as well so assume it will be ok to temporarily swap the SSDs, boot up into the os and dump the data onto my network drive? Do apple have any firmware quirks etc that try to prevent you from doing this? The working machine has macOS Mojave installed and the drive to be recovered has Big Sur installed, could this cause a problem without updating?



Please excuse my ignorance, I'm used to dealing with computers with a more traditional bios setup and want to avoid bricking the working MBP!



Cheers, Matt

In 2013 machines you should have no problem swapping drives. In fact, I replaced the drive in an old 2013 MBP by cloning it to an external drive in an enclosure, then removing the drive from the enclosure and putting it in the Mac.