Restore from Time Machine after upgrade to SSD?

[Jaunty]

Hi all. My mid 2008 iMac internal hard drive is on the way out. This holds my OS, programs documents and photos, with an external drive for music and media, both backed up to a Time Machine drive (and a Super Duper copy off-site. Had a data loss before without a back up..).

I intend to pay somewhere to change the internal drive to SSD (probably a Samsung 256gb 840 Pro in an Icy Box enclosure) as I don't fancy doing it myself. Rather than clone the internal drive to the SSD can I just use Time Machine to restore the internal drive volume on to the clean SSD drive when I get the iMac back with it installed? (Without needing to touch the external drive volume, which is fine).

The Icy Box enclosures seem to be just caddies ie I could not use the caddy to clone the internal drive to the SSD. I would need to buy a sata to usb enclosure to do this. So I am wondering if I can forget this and just use Time Machine.

Hope this makes sense! Thanks for any pointers.

 

[Weaselboy]

Yes, as long as you are on Lion 10.7.2 or later or Mt. Lion you will have a copy of the recovery partition on your TM disk. Just option key boot to the TMN disk and your will get the recovery screen. From there you can use Disk Util to format the SSD then restore everything including the OS and all your data.

 

[Jaunty]

Thanks. I am only on Leopard but have the upgrade disc to go to 10.6, so I can go to 10.8 through the App Store. I might be pushing it with the drive to do the multiple upgrades though.

I do have my Leopard restore disk that will get me to Disk Utility and let me view the Time Machine drive and partition the SSD.

Having said that, I have since found a 2.5" USB caddy. If I use Super Duper to clone the internal drive to the SSD before dropping it off to be installed, should that mean when I get the iMac back and plug it all back to together I am good to go? If so then this seems like a good way to do it.

Thanks again. I always think with these things I'll hit the wrong button and self destruct .

 

[Weaselboy]

Having said that, I have since found a 2.5" USB caddy. If I use Super Duper to clone the internal drive to the SSD before dropping it off to be installed, should that mean when I get the iMac back and plug it all back to together I am good to go? If so then this seems like a good way to do it.

Yes, that would work. Only downside is SD does not copy over the recovery partition if you have moved to Mountain Lion. You can use the free 30 trial of Carbon Copy Cloner to clone and it does move over the recovery partition.

If you are staying on Leopard though, it won't matter.

 

[Jaunty]

Yes, that would work. Only downside is SD does not copy over the recovery partition if you have moved to Mountain Lion. You can use the free 30 trial of Carbon Copy Cloner to clone and it does move over the recovery partition.

If you are staying on Leopard though, it won't matter.

Great think I will do the SSD upgrade first and the OS upgrades afterwards. Many thanks!

 

[Jaunty]

Just as an update fo rpeople who helped. I had problems doing the restore from Time Machine, it was saying it was done (in about 1/2 a second) and was corrupting the SSD drive. (This may have been as I had the SSD in an external USB2 caddy plugged in to the iMac keyboard which I now think was not giving enough power...).

I ended up plugging the SSD into a USB port on the actual iMac, put a clean copy of Snow Leopard on it, then migrated my last back up from Time Machine to the new drive, which all went fine. I have since used the AppStore to go to Mountain Lion. I have a 4Gb stick of RAM to go from 4Gb to the max supported of 6Gb, which should hopefully keep this 2008 iMac going for a bit.

So final question, a bit OT from my original post. The SSD is connected via USB2. Is there much of a performance hit compared to having it properly installed in to the SATAII internal drive in the iMac? The main use will be editing photos. I have read something about overheads/usb drivers afecting it more than the theoretical speeds. I will get it done eventually, it is not the cost more the hassle of getting the iMac to and from the Mac shop.

 

[Weaselboy]

So final question, a bit OT from my original post. The SSD is connected via USB2. Is there much of a performance hit compared to having it properly installed in to the SATAII internal drive in the iMac? The main use will be editing photos. I have read something about overheads/usb drivers afecting it more than the theoretical speeds. I will get it done eventually, it is not the cost more the hassle of getting the iMac to and from the Mac shop.

Here is a test showing an SSD attached with USB2 and it gets about 38MBps read speeds and 32MBps write. Compare to around 200MBps or more you would get with even an average SATAII connected SSD. It will be a BIG difference.