Mid 2011 iMac 21" Replacement Recommendation

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Thanks for the advice, but that is a lot of money to spend when I have just forked out almost £2,000 on a new iMac. Was thinking of just picking up a 2TB external HDD for around £60 and using that as a backup drive.

For Time Machine backup drive, you will soon find out that 2TB will struggle a lot.

 

[Fishrrman]

When you go to do your initial setup, I'd suggest ethernet between the two Macs instead of wifi. Wired is better.

Insofar as setup assistant is concerned (doing migration).
When you "point" setup assistant at the drive to be used as the source (for the migration), SA should "see" ONLY the boot drive in the old iMac. The "second drive" should be left, unseen and "untouched".

That's probably a good thing.
The idea is to get your apps and account(s) migrated, along with basic settings.
This gets the internal SSD up and running without a lot of "other stuff" on it... yet.

As far as "data" goes, that can be easily "migrated by hand" and put wherever you want/need it to be. Be selective. There may be stuff that's best "left behind" (see below).

You probably want to get an EXTERNAL drive, and "dupe" the contents of "the second internal drive" to the external. SuperDuper would be the app of choice to use for this -- easy and FREE to download and use for 30 days.

 

[jeddouglas]

For Time Machine backup drive, you will soon find out that 2TB will struggle a lot.

Even if I currently only have 810GB of storage used?

 

[jeddouglas]

When you go to do your initial setup, I'd suggest ethernet between the two Macs instead of wifi. Wired is better.

Insofar as setup assistant is concerned (doing migration).
When you "point" setup assistant at the drive to be used as the source (for the migration), SA should "see" ONLY the boot drive in the old iMac. The "second drive" should be left, unseen and "untouched".

That's probably a good thing.
The idea is to get your apps and account(s) migrated, along with basic settings.
This gets the internal SSD up and running without a lot of "other stuff" on it... yet.

As far as "data" goes, that can be easily "migrated by hand" and put wherever you want/need it to be. Be selective. There may be stuff that's best "left behind" (see below).

You probably want to get an EXTERNAL drive, and "dupe" the contents of "the second internal drive" to the external. SuperDuper would be the app of choice to use for this -- easy and FREE to download and use for 30 days.

So in my case, I would point the SA to my current internal SSD (used as the boot drive) and not the internal HDD?

Then I should just used SuperDuper to copy the contents of my internal HDD to a new external drive. On that basis I would have the data permanently on the external drive? Is that what you mean?

What about backing up under this scenario?

 

[jeddouglas]

Now that I have ordered my new 24" iMac M1 8 core CPU, 8 core GPU, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD, I am looking for advice on how to set it up please (due to arrive in about 1 week).

I currently have mid 2011 iMac 21" with 12GB RAM, 1TB HDD and a 512MB SATA SSD on High Sierra. Currently I am using the HDD mainly for an old photo library and iTunes library (373GB) and the SSD for the operating system, current photo library, documents etc (440GB). So in total I am using about 813GB across the two internal drives. I also have a Seagate 500GB External HDD that I had used for backing up, but is no longer big enough.

First question, how should I go about setting up my new iMac and transferring over my existing files. It looks like I could use migration assistant over wifi (without a time machine backup), but not sure how this will deal with the fact that I have 2 internal disks on my old iMac, but only 1 disk on new iMac. For example, will it keep the 2 Photo libraries separate?

Second question, my external HDD does not have enough space for a full Time Machine backup. Could I partition the internal HDD and do a Time Machine backup from the SSD to new partition, then back up the internal HDD separately to the external HDD? If so, how do I do this on Time Machine. Also, if successful, would anyone recommend setting up my new iMac from these backups, rather than over wifi?

Finally, after new iMac has been set up, I was thinking about removing the SATA III SSD from the old iMac and getting a relatively cheap (£20) enclosure for it to use as additional external storage. However, I am planning on selling my old iMac so would I be better just leaving SATA III SSD in the old iMac and buying a new one (PCIe NVME) plus enclosure to use as the external storage. I also intend getting perhaps a 2TB external HDD for future backups.

So I have now partitioned my internal 1TB HDD and done the following:

1. Created a Time Machine backup of my internal SSD to the new partition on the HDD
2. Created a Time Machine backup of my original internal HDD partition (old photo library and iTunes library) to my 500GB external HDD

Should I set up new iMac from these backups when it arrives?

Also am considering this as Time Machine backup drive for new iMac:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/14470442...Bk9SR6T86fTsYA&LH_RPA=1&LH_ItemCondition=1000

Finally, think I will extract the 512MB SSD from the current iMac and buy a USB enclosure to use as future storage for new iMac as don’t think it will increase value of current iMac much for re-sale.