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RahX

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 5, 2008
19
0
Hey, so im kinda still new to mac, i bought an Alu. Macbook and im thinking of upgrading the 160 stock harddrive with a 7200.3 seagate soon. I'm just wondering how i can back up everything to the hard drive coz i have no external drive right now. I will buy an enclosure for the 160GB drive if that helps me. Also, i only want to back up the mac portion and i will just do a clean bootcamp setup when i install the new drive. Anyone can help me? thanks
 
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Time Machine is the best way to do a full backup in my opinion.
 
so do i hook up the new bought drive as an external than use time machine to backup? than hook up the hard drive to my macbook?
 
No offense to alexbates, but I think we've started trying to address the issue without a full understanding what you are trying to accomplish. Do you want the Seagate drive to be an exact mirror (excepting the Boot Camp partition) of the 160 GB you have in there right now? Or do you simply want to be able to access the 160 GB after replacing it and then pick/choose what you want to bring over? To make an exact mirror to the larger drive you'll want to use a utility like SuperDuper. This will of course require an external enclosure to put the Seagate into. If you go the Time Machine route, it'll make a backup image of the 160 on the newer drive, but it's not bootable, i.e. you can't tell your MacBook to use that as a startup drive afterwards. Putting the 160 GB in an external enclosure will allow you to bring back your documents, pictures, and other files etc., but not Applications, after reinstalling OS X on the larger drive. Hope I didn't muddy the waters with my 2 cents.
 
thanks alot jedimeister for that info, does superduper also copy applications?
 
SuperDuper clones everything related to the Mac OS, so yes, applications do carry over on the cloned drive/image.
 
All 3 solutions mentioned above are valid... here are some differences

1. Time Machine
Once you install your new HD, you will need to boot from your (Leopard?) install disk. From there, you will be able to select your Time Machine backup to restore to your new HD. Time Machine is not bootable, so you will need your install disk for this. You can use this to completely restore your system the way it was.

2. Super Duper (or, I use Carbon Copy Cloner)
Either of these will create a bootable clone of your HD. Install your new HD and boot from the external with your clone. Clone your external back to your new HD. This will put you back to where you were.

3. Migration Assistant
You will need to clone your drive or have it installed somewhere else to use Target Disk mode to access the data in order to use Migration Assistant. This will allow you to choose which accounts to migrate as well.

Just my 2¢... using Carbon Copy Cloner is the easiest way to go ;)

Woof, Woof - Dawg
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