On times when you have an old Mac consisting all of the OS X, important documents, system applications, non-Apple software etc. and you are prepared to bring a new Mac at home, then you might look after several techniques to copy the entire hard drive of the old Mac onto the new Mac OS X. Creating a copy of the old Mac hard drive will definitely save great amount of time rather installing those applications on the new Mac. What foremost is required to organize the best way of doing so? Let's us look upon the best possible options available that can create a Xerox copy of the drive including OS X, system software and third-party utilities.
- Sync the two Macs: - Looks best to synchronize two Macs and allow copying of files and folders from one to another. However, doing this sounds simple but in actual comprises of several limitations like – the sync may stretch for many hours, even more than 10 hours when copying entire hard drive. The time taken by the sync may lead to more time when data transfer is done manually. Other than time consuming task, the sync also contributes to the poor performance of the Mac and is error-prone. For effective transfer of data using the Migration Assistance the Ethernet or the Wi-Fi need to be faster than average speed.
- Target Disk Mode and cloning: Follow the below steps to transfer the data between two Macs with much ease:
With the fire-wire cable by your side connects both the Macs to make one of them as a source drive while other as destination drives.
When connections are done, press 'T' key of the new Mac OS X to initiate the Target Disk Mode.
On the new machine, install a clone Mac utility which will replicate the old hard drive completely holding the boot information, system, and third-party applications. The cloned copy becomes ready to use copy on the new Mac. If you wish not to copy the entire OS X then with the options like 'Copy Minimal System' select only the required information to boot the Mac rather than copying all the system files. The minimal system feature of the drive clone software is especially made for occasions when the Mac fails to boot due to lack of any important OS X file. The minimal system then fulfills this requirement by copying the missing file back to the drive to begin the Mac's functioning. Cloning a Mac hard drive is most helpful in cases when the user doesn't have the Installation Disk.
Some flaws in the above steps: -
The above steps will certainly of great help of the hardware specs of both the machine are either similar or doesn't have huge difference. Although cloning an old machine for a completely re-designed hardware would create whole lots of troubles for the new Mac to operate on old Mac's cloned copy. In most cases the cloning of the old machine would not even facilitate for the new hardware.