Clearing out old hard drive manually.

[roberthallin]

Hello,

I have just added a SSD to my 2011 iMac (yay) and I now intend to use the internal 1TB HDD just for storage.
I haven't gone through all the stuff I had on the old hard drive since there's about three years worth of stuff on there that'll take some time so sift through.

What I'm wondering is: If all I want to do is save things like documents/photos/music etc that I have on the old hard drive, is it enough to only save my user folder from the old hard drive? Meaning can I safely delete the applications, library and system folders and only see the OS and apps disappear from the drive without losing anything that I've put on there?

I have not manually created or put anything in any of these folders except for the applications of course, but that one's fine to delete.

Thanks.

 

[m4v3r1ck]

Hello,

I have just added a SSD to my 2011 iMac (yay) and I now intend to use the old 1TB HDD just for storage.
I haven't gone through all the stuff I had on the old hard drive since there's about three years worth of stuff on there that'll take some time so sift through.

What I'm wondering is: If all I want to do is save things like documents/photos/music etc that I have on the old hard drive, is it enough to only save my user folder from the old hard drive? Meaning can I safely delete the applications, library and system folders and only see the OS and apps disappear from the drive without losing anything that I've put on there?

I have of course not manually created or put anything in any of these folders except for the applications of course, but that one's fine to delete.

Thanks.

If you want a quick up-and-running 1 TB HDD along your SSD, clone the current HDD to another external disk. This will give you some more headroom and TIME to check and secure your data from the external in a more easy drift, so you won't be tempted making (very) wrong delete decisions to hasty.

Reformat the 1 TB HDD and you're up-and-running with your new config!

Cheers