Resolved How long will cloning take to finish?

[Toebex]

Hello everyone, first time poster here!

So I have been going back and fourth to myself about upgrading my Mac Pro 2009 from OSX Snow Leopard (10.6.8) to Yosemite. I made a thread on the Apple support forums a few weeks ago discussing whether or not I should do it and if so, how. (link: https://discussions.apple.com/message/27106817?ac_cid=op123456#27106817 )

I have decided it is time to go for it and a new 3TB internal drive is in the post as we speak. I have already backed up using time machine, and now I am going to clone my current bootable drive. It is 750GB and I have used (some how) 731GB of it (even though when I look through every folder, it does not add up to nearly that much). I also have a Secondary HD which is 2TB, but that is just backup.

I have decided to use either Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper as everyone seems to love them both so much. My question is, how long will it take to clone 731GB with apps such as FCP7, the entire CS5 suite etc? It would be nice to know before I go about doing it! It took 26 hours to copy 1.68TB using Time Machine to an external drive, and now I am wondering about cloning 731GB to an internal drive.

I love this forum so much, I have used it for countless issues, I just never made an account until now. Any advice would be much appreciated!

-Rory

 

[snorkelman]

If you do have 730GB to shift over from one internal bay to another Id expect something in order of three to four hours

 

[Toebex]

If you do have 730GB to shift over from one internal bay to another Id expect something in order of three to four hours

Amazing! I was expecting something like 10 hours

Thank you for the fast reply!

 

[Fishrrman]

If you're going to put a new drive into the MacPro, and then put Yosemite on it, you DO NOT want to "clone" the contents of the old drive to the new drive.

A "clone" would replace EVERYTHING on the new drive, INCLUDING the newly-installed OS.

Instead, you want to:
- install the new drive in an available bay
- initialize it and install Yosemite onto it
- use "Migration Assistant" to move your older apps, accounts, data and settings over.

 

[kgapp]

If you're going to put a new drive into the MacPro, and then put Yosemite on it, you DO NOT want to "clone" the contents of the old drive to the new drive.

A "clone" would replace EVERYTHING on the new drive, INCLUDING the newly-installed OS.

Fishrman is right. If you clone the drive after you install Yosemite you will lose the install. However, I think the OP's actual plan was to clone the 10.6.8 drive to the new drive and then upgrade that to Yosemite. This plan would be fine (assuming the current OS install is stable and has no issues).

Having used Migration Assistant 5 or 6 times I have had mixed experiences. Sometimes it works fine and sometimes it hangs at the very end of the job. Either way it generally tends to take a lot more time than one would think for users with a lot of data.

I agree you are probably looking at around 3 hours for cloning a 750gb drive. However, if you go the Migration Assistant route you may be looking at anywhere from 2 hours to 24+ hours for 750gb. I used Migration Assistant just the other day on a drive with about 500gb of data and it took over 36 hours to complete (it hung on the last 1 percent of the job for about 32 hours). Even then once complete it did not transfer over the iPhoto library correctly and that had to be moved manually after the job was complete. If you use the Migration Assistant make sure that you verify everything was moved over properly before you go trashing the old drive.

Make sure you have plenty of RAM in your machine before you upgrade it to Yosemite. While Snow Leopard ran fine with 2GB Yosemite will crawl with that amount of memory. I would suggest a minimum of 8GB depending on your usage patterns.

 

[Toebex]

Fishrman is right. If you clone the drive after you install Yosemite you will lose the install. However, I think the OP's actual plan was to clone the 10.6.8 drive to the new drive and then upgrade that to Yosemite. This plan would be fine (assuming the current OS install is stable and has no issues).

Having used Migration Assistant 5 or 6 times I have had mixed experiences. Sometimes it works fine and sometimes it hangs at the very end of the job. Either way it generally tends to take a lot more time than one would think for users with a lot of data.

I agree you are probably looking at around 3 hours for cloning a 750gb drive. However, if you go the Migration Assistant route you may be looking at anywhere from 2 hours to 24+ hours for 750gb. I used Migration Assistant just the other day on a drive with about 500gb of data and it took over 36 hours to complete (it hung on the last 1 percent of the job for about 32 hours). Even then once complete it did not transfer over the iPhoto library correctly and that had to be moved manually after the job was complete. If you use the Migration Assistant make sure that you verify everything was moved over properly before you go trashing the old drive.

Make sure you have plenty of RAM in your machine before you upgrade it to Yosemite. While Snow Leopard ran fine with 2GB Yosemite will crawl with that amount of memory. I would suggest a minimum of 8GB depending on your usage patterns.

Yes, my plan is to clone my current 10.6.8 drive onto a brand new, never used 3TB drive. Once it has been cloned, I would then only upgrade to Yosemite on the new cloned drive. Ive been told countless times that this is a good idea, I don't see what the issue would be?

Thank you all for the replies though! Its great to see so much help

 

[Weaselboy]

Yes, my plan is to clone my current 10.6.8 drive onto a brand new, never used 3TB drive. Once it has been cloned, I would then only upgrade to Yosemite on the new cloned drive. Ive been told countless times that this is a good idea, I don't see what the issue would be?

That should work just fine.

 

[Toebex]

It took me exactly 4 hours and 7 minutes using Carbon Copy Cloner. Not bad