Migrating from large internal HD to smaller SSD. How to?

[Qwerty11]

I am planning to migrate from my iMac with 1.25 TB of internal storage to a MacBook's smaller SSD. I'm looking for advice on how I should make that transition. My iMac currently has about 700 GB of data on it. Any advice? Any tools to make it easier?

 

[tubeexperience]

Upgrade to a 1TB Mushkin Enhanced Reactor and save yourself some headache.

 

[JTToft]

You basically just need to go through your stuff and find out which of it you can live without having with you at all times on the internal SSD and then put everything else on an external drive or online.
No tool to automate it exists.

Or, of course, get a 1 TB internal SSD.

 

[spaceballl]

Most of what they wrote is true, with the exception being if you have an extremely large photo / music library. If that's the case, you can use iCloud Photo Library and iTunes Match to put some of it up in the cloud. You could also move a lot of the less used files to a NAS or something like that. I think the best advice is to just spend some extra money and get the 1TB SSD.

 

[r6mile]

The Macbook does not come in a 1TB SSD AFAIK, only 512GB max. Your best bet is to get a USB3 hard drive in which you can dump the files you don't need to access regularly - 2TB drives are quite cheap these days.

 

[maflynn]

First off find what's consuming the space on your imac

Download and use OmniDiskSweeper. It will provide a sorted list of what's consuming your space.

Secondly determine what in that list can be moved to an external drive. For me, using a MBP, I had my iTunes library on the external drive (that was something in the 50GB range), and I set up my Lightroom library in such a way that prior years were on an external drive but the current year was on my local drive. I also ran my VMs off the external drive as well.

Everyones different, but you may find that a lot of your data can be housed on an external drive. The only other piece of advice is backups. Don't forget to backup your external drive.

 

[JTToft]

The Macbook does not come in a 1TB SSD AFAIK, only 512GB max

- Very true. Though since this is a post in the MacBook Pro forum, I'm guessing the OP is referring to a MacBook Pro and just used "MacBook" as a general description of an Apple notebook. But if he did mean the MacBook, you are of course right about the 512 GB limit.

 

[Fishrrman]

Just get a small, USB3 drive for the new MacBook and store the "seldom-accessed" stuff on it.

Keep the MacBook's internal SSD "lean and clean" ...