Post SSD installation - Time Machine best practices?

[esoda]

Hi,

I have early 2011 MBP with 500gb HD.

I want to install 120 GB SSD as I main drive and have existing HD as secondary drive in optical bay.

here is my situation:

My HD had about 450 gb of data on it, which I have backed up via time machine onto a usb drive.

I'm not going to bother trying the fusion configuration, and instead will just use ssd for system files, applications and some space for data that im working on e.g. java source code etc that I have stored under /Developer. I will be following this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv91m2z6DPY&list=PLFEA8E597EAE953B8&index=3

So, after installing the ssd i want to set it as the boot disk and just move some of the things in there that I want. i.e. system files, apps, and one or 2 other folders which I have under /Developer directory. I want to preserve my itunes and iphoto data (play counts, playlists etc) but to have all that on the HD in the optical bay.

Is it possible to easily do all this when hooking up my time machine backup after the ssd installation ? struggling to find the proper way to do it

hope someone can advise

 

[Weaselboy]

Is it possible to easily do all this when hooking up my time machine backup after the ssd installation ? struggling to find the proper way to do it.

When you use the "restore" feature from a TM drive, it puts everything back on the target drive, and you said you don't want that. I think the better option is just pop the new drive in and do a command-r boot to Internet recovery. Once the recovery screen comes up you can use Disk Util to format the SSD then install the OS. At the end of the install use the Migration Assistant to import only the data you want from the TM disk. Once that is done and you are in your account on the SSD, you can then use the TM disk to manually place the Music and Pictures folders on the HDD.

When you run Migration Assist just uncheck in this screen what you do not want on the SSD.