SuperDuper the way to go?

I'm getting ready to upgrade the hd on my June 2007 MBP. The laptop runs fine, I'm just out of room on the hd. I'd like to just clone the present hd onto the new one, but I assume I can't just drag and drop and I really don't want to re-install all the programs if I don't have to.

Should I just use something like SuperDuper? Would that allow me to clone the old drive to an external hd, then transfer to the new drive?

Thanks for the help

 

That's exactly what it will do. Or you can try Carbon Copy Cloner, which does the same thing, but also allows you to do subsequent backups incrementally rather than complete each time (making backups very quick indeed). Super Duper requires a subscription for that feature.

 

I had an odd issue with my bootup taking a lot longer when I upgraded my HDD using those tools. I ended up just doing a full backup using time machine and using the Snow Leopard disk to boot up and run Disk Utility to restore the backup to the new hdd. It worked perfectly and the boot times are great, especially since I upgraded to a Momentus XT.

 

yeah.. moving to a new hard drive you do not need any 3rd party utilities as long as you have a time machine backup.

For the best running system, I usually do a clean OS install on the drive, then use Migration Assistant to migrate from the Time Machine backup. It restores all your things so its exactly like it was before...

 

Including the previously installed applications?

 

Yes, including the applications and settings etc.

 

Ran into this myself, and discovered the cause with some google search or other over the summer.

The reason this bootup time suddenly increases is that the cloned drive when doing this to a 10.6.x drive loses the Startup Disk setting under System Preferences, and the extra time is the system querying the network for a startup disk 20-30 sec before the whirling gray startup wheel shows up. Whether this is a 10.6.x issue when cloning or specific to the latest version of SuperDuper, I don't know.

To fix the problem go into SysPref, click on the local hard drive as your startup disk, then click the restart bubble. Startup will return to expected short period.

I replicated this with 3 different systems - weird bug but setting the Startup Disk fixes it .

I seem to recall reading somewhere along the way that Time Machine restores can take quite some time depending on the data amount, and that a direct clone is considerably quicker. I've never tried to confirm that myself, however, since cloning has always gone over without incident for me x7 now (I keep gradually upgrading the HDDs in our family systems). And I do keep current TM backups of everything.

 

+1 ClearSkies
Thanks for the info ClearSkies, I am glad to know that I wasn't the only one having that issue and it makes sense that replicating a drive does not necessarily preserve the startup drive flag.

The Time Machine restore did take a long time, but I wasn't really in a hurry so it didn't really have any impact for me.

 

Just my $0.02, I have done the upgrade of HDD using SuperDuper and no problem whatsoever.

Simple steps:
1) CLEAN UP the data in old HDD BEFORE doing the SuperDuper backup.
- Trash can
- Onyx
- Uninstall unused apps

2) Backup in SuperDuper
3) Replace HDD
4) During boot, boot-up from the SuperDuper HDD.

Done.

 

What about using copycatx?

I don't have a mac but I will get one soon and I want replace the hdd with an ssd, so I did some research. According to the copycatx support their product can even clone a hdd that has a bootcamp windows partition, so I would think that their product will clone the entire hdd then you put the new one in and off you go and since it's an exact replica you should not have the issue mentioned by ClearSkies. But again this is in theory I haven't tried it myself with copycatx, I only asked their support.

On windows I have Acronis True image which can clone a hdd then I can simply swap them and boot off the new hdd without any problems.

 

end of story... I got the new drive in, used SuperDuper and things went flawlessly. I did follow the advice of ClearSkies and check the System Preferences; sure enough it was set to start up via the network. A simple click and things are running smooth again.
Thanks for the advice and help, all.