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Cloning my HDD (for a new SSD)

S

Sylte

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 4, 2013
1
0
Hi guys!
I've decided to upgrade the HHD in my late 2011 MBP to a SSD. I have just recieved my Corsair Sata 3 GT 240gb and will be cloning my HDD over the weekend. I have never cloned nor changed a HDD in a MBP before, but I will follow the steps in this guide;

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4122

I think the guide is pretty good, but there's a few questions I would like to ask just to get the whole process down as smooth as possible. First of all I was wondering if need to change anything like you would do in the BIOS on a windows machine?

And after I have used CCC to clone and switch etc, will I need to format my old HDD before using it as an external drive (with a case) or can I just plug it in and use it straight off the bat?

EDIT: If I want to do a clean installation instead of cloning, will I then have to repurchase apps through appstore and the Microsoft Office package?

If someone could shed some light on this, or just give me some general tips on the whole process I would be really grateful!
 
Last edited:
Here's a simple approach:
  1. Buy an external enclosure and put your old drive in it.
  2. Install your new drive in your Mac.
  3. Boot from your old (external) drive by holding the Option key on startup.
  4. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old (external) drive to the new (internal) drive.
  5. Boot from the new internal drive.
  6. Your now running on your new internal drive and your old drive is now an external drive, useful for backups or additional storage.
 
To answer the first question, you will not need to format your old HDD before using it as an external drive. You can just put the HDD in the external caddy, connect it to a USB port, and it should be detected by the OS. If it does not appear in Finder after connecting, try looking for it in Disk Utility.

Sorry, I don't know the answer to your apps question.
 
Hi I am also in the process of cloning my old hard drive to my new 512gb ssd. I'm not that mac/tech savvy to say the least so I don't know what to do after it clones.

I can now boot up the laptop from the ssd? Do I have to delete everything on my old drive in order to just have my media and such on the hard drive? Do I have to move itunes to the hard drive in order for it to play my music? Wouldn't it be faster for the application to be on the ssd and then have it retrieve the song from the hard drive?

sorry for the noob questions :eek:
 
cloning? why dont u guys just use timecapsule?

anyway, theres no need to delete the hdd to use it external
 
freduke said:
Hi I am also in the process of cloning my old hard drive to my new 512gb ssd. I'm not that mac/tech savvy to say the least so I don't know what to do after it clones.

I can now boot up the laptop from the ssd? Do I have to delete everything on my old drive in order to just have my media and such on the hard drive? Do I have to move itunes to the hard drive in order for it to play my music? Wouldn't it be faster for the application to be on the ssd and then have it retrieve the song from the hard drive?

sorry for the noob questions :eek:
Click to expand...

Yes, once you have all your data off the HDD you would want to erase it so the old OS and apps are not taking up space there. Afterward, you would want to leave all apps on the SSD. You can keep your music only on the external HDD if you like, but iTunes app itself would stay on the SSD.
 
bushido said:
sorry i meant Time Machine not Time Capsule
Click to expand...
As stated, Time Machine cannot make bootable clones. That means you'd have to reinstall the OS and then restore from your TM backup, whereas with CCC, you simply boot up from the cloned backup.
 
Sylte said:
EDIT: If I want to do a clean installation instead of cloning, will I then have to repurchase apps through appstore and the Microsoft Office package?

If someone could shed some light on this, or just give me some general tips on the whole process I would be really grateful!
Click to expand...

Whether you clone your drive or do a clean installation, Microsoft Office may prompt you to reactivate since it will detect that it is on a new drive. Make sure you have your product key handy. I recently purchased a new Mac (more below) and needed to find the printout of the e-mail with the product key so I could re-activate it. (I almost made the mistake of simply saving the e-mail with the key on my hard drive, which I couldn't open up since it was an Outlook e-mail and I couldn't open Outlook because it asked for an activation key. :mad: I now have the product key saved elsewhere).

justperry said:
No worries.

There is another reason a Clone is better, it will not create local backups on the Mac, and if you have only 128 GB like on an Air space is precious.

TimeMachine is for "Dummies".
Click to expand...

Time Machine is a great secondary backup solution. While I clone my drives regularly to an external drive, it is nice having a Time Capsule in the background. I recently lost my 2012 MacBook Air while traveling (Find My Mac "found" and erased it in an airport but no one ever turned it in). I had it insured, and used the proceeds to buy the 13" rMBP. While I had a clone backup, it was about a month old, so I wound up using Migration Assistant to restore from my Time Capsule anyway, and my new Mac was right back to where the old one was the night before I left for the airport.

CCC and Time Machine are a great backup combination. I used Migration Assistant from the cloned drive first (it took 12 minutes to restore from my Seagate Thunderbolt drive), created a new login, and then used Migration Assistant to restore my existing account from my Time Capsule over Ethernet. That took another hour or so. Had I simply migrated from Time Capsule alone it would have taken over 12 hours as I had about 70GB to copy over.
 
justperry said:
No worries.

There is another reason a Clone is better, it will not create local backups on the Mac, and if you have only 128 GB like on an Air space is precious.

TimeMachine is for "Dummies".
Click to expand...

The local backups created by Time Machine do not detract from space available to the user for storage. If the OS sees you require more storage it will shrink the local backups.

From here:

Local snapshots are periodically condensed into daily or weekly snapshots to minimize the space used on your disk. If your disk is low on space, Time Machine stops creating new snapshots, and some or all existing snapshots may be removed to make space available for applications to use. If sufficient disk space becomes available again, Time Machine resumes creating local snapshots. This means your disk will have the same amount of available space as it would if Time Machine were not enabled.
Click to expand...

GGJstudios said:
As stated, Time Machine cannot make bootable clones. That means you'd have to reinstall the OS and then restore from your TM backup, whereas with CCC, you simply boot up from the cloned backup.
Click to expand...

No you don't. Since Lion you can put in a new, blank disk and boot to a local (USB) TM backup and format the disk and do a full restore of the OS and data without first installing the OS.

The only downside to TM is one cannot run from the TM backup, but it will do a full restore including the OS just like CCC would. Arguably, TM is simpler and offers more options such as picking a point in time to restore from.
 
Weaselboy said:
The local backups created by Time Machine do not detract from space available to the user for storage. If the OS sees you require more storage it will shrink the local backups.

From here:





No you don't. Since Lion you can put in a new, blank disk and boot to a local (USB) TM backup and format the disk and do a full restore of the OS and data without first installing the OS.

The only downside to TM is one cannot run from the TM backup, but it will do a full restore including the OS just like CCC would. Arguably, TM is simpler and offers more options such as picking a point in time to restore from.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the information Weaselboy, didn't know this.

So, if I understand correctly you more or less boot from the TM backup but without the full OS X experience, just an emergency boot lets say and it will allow you to erase and install on the internal disk?
If this is the case TM is more capable than I initially thought.
 
justperry said:
Thanks for the information Weaselboy, didn't know this.
Click to expand...

You bet. :)

justperry said:
So, if I understand correctly you more or less boot from the TM backup but without the full OS X experience, just an emergency boot lets say and it will allow you to erase and install on the internal disk?

If this is the case TM is more capable than I initially thought.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Since Lion 10.7.2, what happens is the first TM backup puts a copy of Recovery HD on the TM external drive. So if you option key boot and select the TM drive you will see what looks exactly like the normal Recovery HD screen with all the same functionality to format and restore.
 
I'm not a professional about the Mac Operation System, but I do know alot about Windows 7 and i know that the newer versions of OSx supports this thing called TRIM, and if you are unsure what Trim is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM


But anyways, carbon copying will not be utilizing Trim as far as I know and thus you would be reducing the life of your SSD :eek:
 
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