My 2011 MBP has recently started booting only intermittently, and so it’s time for me to find something at least a little newer. I had previously removed the unreliable optical drive and added a second internal hard drive. (Inside is a 1TB HDD and 180GB SSD. The latter was my first SSD and I’ll never boot from anything else again!)
I have a full Time Machine back up of everything, all drives other than the TM drive itself.
I recently bid on and won a 13” 2014 MBP with a busted screen. I have a big monitor and keep my machine on the bench. But, laptop with broken screen ended up cheaper than a Mac Mini, so there we go. (Money’s beyond tight.) This machine has 8GB of RAM and a 128GB internal SSD. My understanding is that I’m stuck with these.
I wanted to sketch out my plan to make sure it doesn’t raise any red flags for those who have kept up with Mac stuff more than I have the last decade.
My 2011 MBP runs 10.12 Sierra, booting from the internal SSD. It supports 10.13 High Sierra as its max OS, but I had stuck with 10.12 in order to prolong the life of FCP7. (I’ve got a few projects I want to finish with it even now, and then I’ll have to scoot over to FCPX. I’m not a professional, so I’ve just been stubborn and I don’t *need* to use either for anything super important.)
Plan:
- Buy USB enclosures for both internal drives
- Boot 10.12 Sierra from that USB SSD that used to be internal
- Install current macOS (clean install) onto new internal SSD (or possibly the other way around since I’ll have a bit more space on the external SSD)
- Use migration assistant to retrieve stuff from the 10.12 time machine backup
The two boot volumes, Sierra and Catalina/Big Sur, would start out being set up similarly when this is done, with my settings and apps and stuff, but can evolve from there. I can jump back into Sierra if I need anything, and that’s worth dedicating a small SSD to. I never learned audio editing in FCPX and I think I’ve gotten pretty adept at it with FCP7.
I know there have been some file system and other sorts of changes since Sierra, so I want to make sure things work out. Should I format my external drives to the new file system or will that leave them inaccessible to the Sierra boot drive? Use exFAT? (Sounds like me when I lost weight. Okay, sorry for the dad joke.) I imagine having separate partitions on my Time Machine drive that could be in different file system formatting would allow both boot drives to create time machine backups.)
or any other traps you could see me falling into?
I have a full Time Machine back up of everything, all drives other than the TM drive itself.
I recently bid on and won a 13” 2014 MBP with a busted screen. I have a big monitor and keep my machine on the bench. But, laptop with broken screen ended up cheaper than a Mac Mini, so there we go. (Money’s beyond tight.) This machine has 8GB of RAM and a 128GB internal SSD. My understanding is that I’m stuck with these.
I wanted to sketch out my plan to make sure it doesn’t raise any red flags for those who have kept up with Mac stuff more than I have the last decade.
My 2011 MBP runs 10.12 Sierra, booting from the internal SSD. It supports 10.13 High Sierra as its max OS, but I had stuck with 10.12 in order to prolong the life of FCP7. (I’ve got a few projects I want to finish with it even now, and then I’ll have to scoot over to FCPX. I’m not a professional, so I’ve just been stubborn and I don’t *need* to use either for anything super important.)
Plan:
- Buy USB enclosures for both internal drives
- Boot 10.12 Sierra from that USB SSD that used to be internal
- Install current macOS (clean install) onto new internal SSD (or possibly the other way around since I’ll have a bit more space on the external SSD)
- Use migration assistant to retrieve stuff from the 10.12 time machine backup
The two boot volumes, Sierra and Catalina/Big Sur, would start out being set up similarly when this is done, with my settings and apps and stuff, but can evolve from there. I can jump back into Sierra if I need anything, and that’s worth dedicating a small SSD to. I never learned audio editing in FCPX and I think I’ve gotten pretty adept at it with FCP7.
I know there have been some file system and other sorts of changes since Sierra, so I want to make sure things work out. Should I format my external drives to the new file system or will that leave them inaccessible to the Sierra boot drive? Use exFAT? (Sounds like me when I lost weight. Okay, sorry for the dad joke.) I imagine having separate partitions on my Time Machine drive that could be in different file system formatting would allow both boot drives to create time machine backups.)
or any other traps you could see me falling into?
