Following the recent release of Apple’s new notebooks, many of us will be updating our current systems. The lucky ones will go out and make their new purchase and then come home and use Migration Assistant to transfer all of their data from their old Mac. However, those of us who aren’t so lucky will need to sell our current systems in order to raise the cash for our upgrades.
For those of us who won’t have our old system when we bring home our new one, I have prepared a tutorial on how to backup all of your data on to an external HD and then transfer that backup to your new notebook later.
Needless to say in order to do this, you’re going to need an external hard drive. The size of which will depend on how much data you will be backing up.
To start, open Disk Utility, an application included in OS X, located in ‘Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility’. When you open Disk Utility, you will notice down the left-hand side are the drives available to you…
‘External HD’ is where I will be backing up my data. Select the drive you wish to use as your backup disk and on the right hand side you will have the option of four tabs…
To backup our data, you will need to select the ‘Restore’ option. You will then be greeted by two boxes — one for the ‘source’ of you backup (the location of the data we are backing up, in this case our HD), and one for the ‘destination’ of your backup (the location of where the data will be copied). You can simply drag the drives from the list on the right hand side in to the desired boxes. Make sure you put the correct drives in the correct boxes otherwise you may overwrite and lose data accidentally.
As far as I know, and for obvious reasons, your backup drive must be empty or formatted or at least partitioned to prevent other data mixing with your backup. If your drive hasn’t already been formatted, you can check the ‘Erase destination’ box. Obviously be sure to backup any data on the external drive as this will be deleted.
All that’s left to do at this point is click the ‘Restore’ button the in the lower right-hand corner and let it do its work. It make take a while if you have a lot to backup… maybe leave it overnight…?
Now, you have your data backed up on your hard drive and you have your new Apple notebook, all you need to do now is transfer your backup to your new system. To do this, you will need to bootup your Mac using your external HD as a startup disk. This can be done in two ways — first you can boot up your Mac as normal and then select the desired startup disk using ‘System Preferences > Startup Disk’, or, the easiest method I believe is to simply hold down the ‘option’ key as your Mac boots up and then select your external HD. You will find that your Mac will run much slower and take longer to startup whilst using your external HD as the startup disk.
Once booted, start up Disk Utility once again. This time, select your Macintosh HD from the options down the right-hand side and under the ‘Restore’ tab, drag your drives in to the correct boxes. This time, your ‘source’ drive will be your external HD and your ‘destination’ drive will be your Macintosh HD…
Then click the ‘Restore’ button and wait for all of your data to be copied to your new Mac.
It’s as simple as that!
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