OK, I've decided that I want to move from having the two drives in my Mini treated as two separate drives to having them formatted as a single drive with RAID. The question is, what's the current best practice for doing this migration? I've got a large external drive that I can back up to. Can I do the whole thing with a Time Machine backup or do I need something like Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make sure I get the whole disk copied over?
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Current best practice for moving to a new boot drive (OS X Yosemite)
- Thread starter dahosek
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I'd do it this way:
(Note: I will assume that ONE of the two internal drives is set up to be the boot drive, and the other is not)
1. Partition your external drive into two partitions.
2. Use a cloning app (CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper) to clone each drive to a respective partition. I'd clone the boot drive to the FIRST partition (highest one visible in Disk Utility's window).
3. Next, BOOT UP from the cloned backup partition.
4. Reinitialize both internal drives, then set up the RAID.
5. Now, use CCC (or SD) to "Re-clone" the contents of the bootable backup BACK TO the new RAID.
6. Finally, use the Finder to "manually migrate" the contents of the second (non-boot) drive over to the new RAID. This allows you to place folders and files wherever you wish.
7. Finally, set up a single external drive to be your "RAID backup".
Again, this is how I'd do it. My way isn't always the easiest....
(Note: I will assume that ONE of the two internal drives is set up to be the boot drive, and the other is not)
1. Partition your external drive into two partitions.
2. Use a cloning app (CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper) to clone each drive to a respective partition. I'd clone the boot drive to the FIRST partition (highest one visible in Disk Utility's window).
3. Next, BOOT UP from the cloned backup partition.
4. Reinitialize both internal drives, then set up the RAID.
5. Now, use CCC (or SD) to "Re-clone" the contents of the bootable backup BACK TO the new RAID.
6. Finally, use the Finder to "manually migrate" the contents of the second (non-boot) drive over to the new RAID. This allows you to place folders and files wherever you wish.
7. Finally, set up a single external drive to be your "RAID backup".
Again, this is how I'd do it. My way isn't always the easiest....
What type of RAID are you using, RAID1 or RAID0? Keep in mind that if you use RAID0 and one of those hard drives fails you will lose everything on both hard drives. It was not clear from your post if you realized that. Just make sure you have Time Machine backups, to another external hard drive, once you have the RAID setup.
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