Alright so I just bought a new hard drive for my macbook pro MC374LL/A. Upgrading from the stock 250gb hd to a 1tb hard drive. Anyways, my question is when I get this hard drive, how do I transfer everything from the 250 hd over to this new one? Do I use the time machine? I am sorry. I am very new to this stuff.
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Hard drive question
- Thread starter Theone0581
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Alright interesting. I am reading up on Migration Assistant on the apple website, and apparently I need tow macs to use Migration Assistant? If that's the case, then I don't think that it will work because I only have one mac. Am I missing something?
Use Time Machine. You won't even realize you've switched hard drives (except for the fact that you'll have a lot more room).
If you have a backup made to an external HDD using Time Machine, you can use the Setup & Migration Assistant to restore data from the TM backup HDD.
Time Machine FAQ
While that is a possible way, cloning is faster than using TM to restore from and the Mac is still usable while doing so.
As this topic hasn't been beaten to dead yet:
OP, get the HDD and an enclosure for 2.5" S-ATA HDDs using USB as interface, which will cost around 10 .
Then insert the new HDD, format it correctly (links in my first reply), the use CarbonCopyCloner to clone the internal HDD to the external.
Then switch the HDDs and boot from the internal, now new, HDD.
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Restoring from Time Machine is probably the best and easiest option. IIRC, when you restore from a TM backup, it basically defragments the data, putting files in good locations for fast and efficient access. I'm not sure if the other programs do that. Then there's also some metadata that IIRC SuperDuper! will copy that CCC doesn't copy. Since TM is made by Apple they know all the metadata that needs to be copied.
TM won't backup things like your Spotlight index file, but that is automatically regenerated on the first boot. It takes some time but it only has to be done once.
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-state-of-backup-and-cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?referrerid=59552&t=486306
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/553788/
TM won't backup things like your Spotlight index file, but that is automatically regenerated on the first boot. It takes some time but it only has to be done once.
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-state-of-backup-and-cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?referrerid=59552&t=486306
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/553788/