CLONE YOUR MAC

Make a copy of everything on your Mac before you start. Here’s how…

THERE ARE LOTS of ways to move to a new Mac, and one of the easiest is to clone your existing one. This creates a perfect copy of your current Mac’s system, data and all your files, and it’s straightforward. All you need is a decent amount of external storage and a cloning app. We particularly rate Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! (see below), both of which make it exceptionally easy to clone some or all of your Mac system. Just make sure both Macs are running the same version of macOS.

Before you consider cloning, though, it’s a very good idea to do some housekeeping so that any messy bits from your old Mac don’t make it across to your new one. A good place to start is in the Settings > General > Storage menu, or if you’re running a macOS prior to macOS 13 Ventura, in > About This Mac > Storage. This enables you to see what’s taking up space on your Mac; for example, you might have some old apps gathering digital dust in a remote corner of your Applications folder, or a Documents folder full of old files you should have deleted years ago.

Cloning isn’t just for moving data from one Mac to another. It’s also a useful form of backup, and the same third–party tools that make cloning so simple also feature useful backup options and scheduling tools. For example, while the free version of SuperDuper! offers unlimited cloning, by paying the small purchase fee you unlock the Smart Update feature that keeps your clone up to date.

MAKE YOUR CLONE

Cloning a Mac will likely involve transferring a lot of data — our MacBook Pro has over 400GB of data on its built–in SSD — so it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to simply clone to a USB stick. External USB 3.0 drives are the best trade–off between price and speed (provided that your Mac has USB 3, of course; if it doesn’t you’ll be limited to USB 2.0 speeds). For

example, the 1TB external SSD we’ve used in our tutorials was a reasonable $98. Hard disks may be cheaper — a 1TB external hard drive is about $55 — but they’re a lot slower. Always buy more storage than you think you’ll need.

If you don’t already have an external drive or SSD, you’ll probably need to format it before you can clone your Mac to it. Most drives come pre–formatted with exFAT, which is used by Windows, but for Macs you’ll need to go into Disk Utility and format your new drive as macOS Journaled or better still, APFS. APFS is the Apple File System and it’s the fastest, most reliable standard format for Mac storage.

USE YOUR CLONE

If you’ve made a complete, bootable clone (the default option in most cloning apps) then it’s just a matter of connecting your external drive with the clone on it to the Mac you want to copy it to. In Settings > General > Startup Disk (on older Macs, it’s System Preferences > General > Startup Disk), choose the external drive as your startup disk and click Restart. Then use the cloning app to copy your clone to the destination disk or SSD.

If you chose to make a disk image rather than a bootable clone, that’s simple too. Connect your external drive but don’t change the startup disk: launch Migration Assistant and choose the option to restore from your disk image.