In my case I connected the new drive on the outside of my computer to do this: Step 2: Install Mavericks on the new drive. If you’ve never cloned to that drive it will pop up asking you if you want to create a recovery partition. Click the “Clone” button when you are ready.

The drive you are copying to needs to be at least big enough to hold all your data but it can be a larger drive (and can be a different brand too). To back up your HD run Carbon copy cloner and pick the hard drive you want to back up in the left side drop-down menu and the location you want it copied to in the right drop-down menu:Ĭreating a bootable backup of your HD is easy with Carbon Copy Cloner They don’t sponsor me or anything but you can buy it here for $39.95 (as of April 9, 2014). Carbon Copy Cloner used to be freeware but a couple years ago they switched it to commercial software. It takes advantage of the unix framework underlying Mac OS X and makes a perfect bootable copy of your HD that could be cloned right back. I was amazed at how many of my own blog posts I needed to revisit in order to remember how to get things back the way they were–it sure is handy! I want a clean install so there’s no baggage laying around. Install all the programs from scratch.All I needed to do was copy the various folders and files over to the new installation. I kept my data on the 750 gig HD that came factory in the MacBook. Since your data is coming from an updated version of Mavericks (and software like iPhoto, iTunes, etc) you’ll want to update Mavericks until there are no more updates before copying your data over (since your data goes with the latest versions of the software).

Check for Updates on the Mac App Store.

It has (had) a 5-Star rating with over 1,800 reviews (not too shabby). I just purchased a Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 750GB 2.5-Inch (not made anymore, get a 1T SSD here). This gives me an exact, bootable, and easily recoverable version of my data.

Backup all data - I have multiple external drives that I use to clone my HD’s using Carbon Copy Cloner.

I decided it was time to start from scratch and do a fresh install because I haven’t done so since I installed my first SSD. I just purchased a larger SSD and had to make a decision on whether I was going to mirror my current boot drive, a 256 Gig SSD drive, onto my new 750 Gig SSD or start from scratch, reinstall the OS, and move over my data only. How to Upgrade the Hard Drive on Your Mac, Install Mavericks, and Copy Your Data Over This post isn’t about how to physically upgrade the Hard Drive on your Mac ( gives a great tutorial here) I wanted to give an overview of how to perform a HD upgrade.

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