SOLVED Ssd to hd

[dennisfcampbell]

have a late 2015 imac w/ hd and need to back up my one remaining external ssd, external time machine has failed, how to transfer the complete ssd to the hd .............
thanks

 

[TonyAguila]

have a late 2015 imac w/ hd and need to back up my one remaining external ssd, external time machine has failed, how to transfer the complete ssd to the hd .............
thanks

Are you booted from the external SSD? Are you able to connect a new external HD at the same time? (You should be able to with the multiple USB ports in the iMac.) I assume you are using USB for both the SSD and the Time Machine drive. So before you start moving files around, I suggest you do a fresh Time Machine backup. Don’t rely on trying to fix the failed Time Machine drive, not until you have done a fresh, reliable backup. Once your data is secure, we can go onto the business of what to do with the SSD and internal HD (fusion drive, I assume).

As a default, I always have at least two TM drives for each of my systems. And for more critical data, I also clone those volumes to more external drives.

 

[dennisfcampbell]

have an imac with internal hd and until now the imac has been for storage only……the loss of my external ssd "time machine back up" has left me with only one external ssd drive that boots my laptop - whose internal drive no longer functions...... need to copy my boot drive to the imac hd, am not in a place where a new ssd is available


hope this is clearer.........


thanks for the reply

 

[TonyAguila]

have an imac with internal hd and until now the imac has been for storage only……the loss of my external ssd "time machine back up" has left me with only one external ssd drive that boots my laptop - whose internal drive no longer functions...... need to copy my boot drive to the imac hd, am not in a place where a new ssd is available


hope this is clearer.........


thanks for the reply

Good. That clears up a few things. I’m curious. Will the SSD that basically runs the laptop also run the iMac? Being a late 2015 iMac, it should be able to run Monterey. I have a solution in mind, but I need to know if the laptop is also capable of running macOS 12.

The reason I need to know is because I was going to suggest doing a macOS installation on the SSD from Recovery, and Recovery will default to installing the newest version of macOS that your Mac is capable of running. So if you are going to do an update or installation on the iMac in order to migrate the data from the external SSD, this will indeed create a backup of the (laptop’s) SSD. The question is whether the laptop can then boot from the SSD anymore, if it’s not capable of running Monterey.

I know, this is starting to sound quite convoluted. It will help if I knew the model of the laptop.

And at this stage, I think it will be easier to just get an external hard drive to use as a Time Machine drive for the laptop. I’m sure the SSD is not that large, so you should be able to get away with a 2-terabyte hard drive for backup. The only requirement is for the laptop’s capability to connect to two USB devices at once. I’m sure it will. Those small external drives have gotten a lot cheaper lately.

 

[dennisfcampbell]

Tony
thanks for the input....am running mojave 10.14 and my primary os for the imac and laptop is from the external ssd...... if there was a new ext. drive available would CCC the existing drive and have peace of mind but all ive got is the imac hd and dont know how to transfer the data........

 

[TonyAguila]

Tony
thanks for the input....am running mojave 10.14 and my primary os for the imac and laptop is from the external ssd...... if there was a new ext. drive available would CCC the existing drive and have peace of mind but all ive got is the imac hd and dont know how to transfer the data........

Okay, if you are running macOS Mojave on both, and if you have enough free space on the iMac hard drive, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the SSD to a disk image on the iMac. That should create a workable copy. If for some reason the SSD crashes and you need to replace it, the CCC disk image can be used to restore to a new SSD. Just make sure your CCC clones are up-to-date.

It’s important that you are still in Mojave because if you upgrade to Catalina or later, CCC clones will not be bootable. You will have to change over to SuperDuper, which, even if I do own of copy of it, I haven’t used it enough to recommend it. All I know is that it can create bootable copies of Monterey (and Catalina, and Big Sur) volumes, but can’t do all the other things that CCC does, and that is why I cannot change over to it at this stage.

 

[dennisfcampbell]

thanks tony