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Macbook SSD upgrade + clean OS install

cabby

By cabby
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cabby Newbie

cabby

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Decided I should swap the 500gb on my 15" mid-2012 i7 and will probably go for this 

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/665518-sandisk-960gb-ultra-ii-sataiii-2-5inch-ssd-sdssdhii-960g-g25.

 

I've accumulated a lot of crap over the years and want to use this opportunity to get rid (i'll keep the old HDD for a bit in case I discover i've lost anything important) hence want to take the opportunity to do a clean OS install which is where my limited knowledge of such things starts to fail me.  I did previously upgrade the HDD on an older mac but cloned so a little easier.  

 

Basically i'd like to install Yosemite and then take over certain things like my photo library and music.  I guess there are also (to me) less obvious things like the contents on my keychain etc. that I should find a way of keeping.

 

Any suggested process or steps to take to make the most of the SSD install and optimise the data I take over ?  

 

Cheers 

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CarMad Explorer

CarMad

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I'd back the current one up with time machine onto an external HD first or you might be able to mount it as an external drive if not depending on what hardware you have. 

 

Depending on how old it is you can also restore and build it from scratch from the CMD+R and it will download the OS and install it all for you. You might want to then upgrade the OS again to the latest version and patches and then continue with all the other software. 

 

Your keychain might be held locally still and there are plenty of guides on how to find it and transfer it. 

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NewNiceMrMe Newbie

NewNiceMrMe

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When I swapped out my knackered SSD for a new Transcend JetDrive SSD, the stuff like Keychain etc was indeed held.  No loss at all.

 

I see the appeal of a clean install too.  I took the opportunity to only download the stuff I really needed and since then I've occasionally gone and got a few other bits and bobs I had backed up, but not much.

 

I'm inclined to think a clean install is a worthwhile process ony any machine but less so on a Mac because of how good OSX is.  On a Windows machine I used to find myself doing fresh installs almost annually.

 

p.s. from a photo's perspective, I don't download my images.  They're on Amazon Photo's and Google Photo's and I just go and grab a photograph if I need it, but I've no real interest in them taking up drive space locally.  If I was you, I'd do the clean install and then download the stuff you know you want - then treat the old HDD as a holding point for stuff you find you want over time.  Within about 4-6 weeks I found I'd got everything and stopped going to the back-up.  Then again, I'm a big fan of cloud working and 95% of all my data (if not more) is held in the cloud and never held locally.

Edited by NewNiceMrMe
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cabby Newbie

cabby

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I'd back the current one up with time machine onto an external HD first or you might be able to mount it as an external drive if not depending on what hardware you have. 

 

Depending on how old it is you can also restore and build it from scratch from the CMD+R and it will download the OS and install it all for you. You might want to then upgrade the OS again to the latest version and patches and then continue with all the other software. 

 

Your keychain might be held locally still and there are plenty of guides on how to find it and transfer it.

Once removed and mounted in a case the old disk will be bootable externally I believe so should be able to skip this step.

Never used the CMD+R command - a bit of reading to do on that.

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cabby Newbie

cabby

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When I swapped out my knackered SSD for a new Transcend JetDrive SSD, the stuff like Keychain etc was indeed held.  No loss at all.

 

I see the appeal of a clean install too.  I took the opportunity to only download the stuff I really needed and since then I've occasionally gone and got a few other bits and bobs I had backed up, but not much.

 

I'm inclined to think a clean install is a worthwhile process ony any machine but less so on a Mac because of how good OSX is.  On a Windows machine I used to find myself doing fresh installs almost annually.

 

p.s. from a photo's perspective, I don't download my images.  They're on Amazon Photo's and Google Photo's and I just go and grab a photograph if I need it, but I've no real interest in them taking up drive space locally.  If I was you, I'd do the clean install and then download the stuff you know you want - then treat the old HDD as a holding point for stuff you find you want over time.  Within about 4-6 weeks I found I'd got everything and stopped going to the back-up.  Then again, I'm a big fan of cloud working and 95% of all my data (if not more) is held in the cloud and never held locally.

Re Amazon and Google, do these 'talk' to Photo or do you use these instead?

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NewNiceMrMe Newbie

NewNiceMrMe

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Re Amazon and Google, do these 'talk' to Photo or do you use these instead?

 

They don't talk to Photo.  I simply download stuff from them if I want to and put it wherever locally.  However, most of the time I just use them without downloading (unless I was wanting to print a photograph, etc.).

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Andrew Newbie

Andrew

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I too am musing this. I currently have 440Gb of my 500Gb HDD used so logic would say I upgrade to a 1TB SSD. However, looking at the analysis of the storage usage, "other" is 262Gb. So this doesn't include films, music or apps such as Office. That looks rather large to me.

 

In case Mac drops in - it is still on the bill it had when you gave it to me so you might be the best person who can answer this - or maybe that is the size of OSX?

 

Any ideas from anyone else perhaps? Can I reduce down this "other" size? All I use it for is browsing, Office (very few saved files), music (60Gb) and photos (30Gb).

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NewNiceMrMe Newbie

NewNiceMrMe

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It never ceases to amaze me how much local storage some people use.  I must be the exception when it comes to off-device storage.

 

Maybe the use of cloud computing is slower to catch on than I thought? 

 

I have the grand total, including OSX, Office365, 4 browsers and a host of social media apps, of 133gb of used storage on my SSD.  That's the highest it has been in a very long time too and I shall probably give it a clean out soon.

Edited by NewNiceMrMe
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Andrew Newbie

Andrew

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I think my point was that I wanted to use less. Have a few backups so Cloud not really required/desired.

 

My interest though is why "other" is so large. Especially since your list of apps and "stuff" amounts to 133GB. I want mine to be 133GB plus the 100GB in music, video and photos. Then I can buy a 500GB SDD and not have to fork out for a 1TB version.

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NewNiceMrMe Newbie

NewNiceMrMe

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Oh no, my 133gb can be broken down to this...

 

Apps - 40gb

Other - 89gb

Photos - 2gb

Video - 2gb

Back ups - 0.1gb

Audio - 0.1gb

 

The "other" element that you're talking about (my 89gb above) is stuff like the System folders and cache, documents, contacts, iCal (which I use to a colossal extent), app plug-ins and extensions (bizarrely not included in the 'Apps' figure), media not classified by Spotlight, file types not recognised by Spotlight.

 

p.s. have a read of this.  You'll see it also tells you that things like fonts (often using a lot of space), library files such as screensavers and desktop backgrounds, disk images and archives - and zip files are in 'other'.  I often forget to clean out Downloads and that includes zip files that tend to add up after a period of time.

 

For example, I have just moved my entire Downloads folder content to Trash and then emptied it.

 

My 133gb of used space has now dropped to....81.5gb. 

 

In other words, I've just freed up 51.5gb of disk space.  A quick glance at my breakdown in disk use shows that it all went from "others". +++

Edited by NewNiceMrMe
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Mac Apprentice

Mac

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I too am musing this. I currently have 440Gb of my 500Gb HDD used so logic would say I upgrade to a 1TB SSD. However, looking at the analysis of the storage usage, "other" is 262Gb. So this doesn't include films, music or apps such as Office. That looks rather large to me.

 

In case Mac drops in - it is still on the bill it had when you gave it to me so you might be the best person who can answer this - or maybe that is the size of OSX?

 

Any ideas from anyone else perhaps? Can I reduce down this "other" size? All I use it for is browsing, Office (very few saved files), music (60Gb) and photos (30Gb).

 

 

Check for TimeMachine local snapshots?

 

As for not using much storage - here's my iMac :o

 

SomeStorage.jpg

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Andrew Newbie

Andrew

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Thanks for that, interesting. I cleared downloads and trash (14,000 items in there) any now I have:

 

Other: 194Gb

Backups: 88Gb

Audio: 52Gb

Movies: 42Gb

Apps: 37Gb

Photos: 21Gb

 

So Backups look significant and thanks Mac for the timely post above. I've got a Time Machine box thing (3Tb) taking constant backups so I shouldn't need too many on my local drive I shouldn't think so 88Gb of backups seems excessive. iPhone and iPad are both backed up to the Mac but the iPad has about 20Gb on it and the iPhone 30Gb - surely the backups are not exact replicas are they - surely just references to existing files (most of the stuff is music).

 

No idea how to find backups despite searching on Google. Maybe there are a load of historical backups from before I had the Time Capsule.

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Mac Apprentice

Mac

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30Tb is a bit excessive for an iMac. Perhaps.

 

Yes, ignore it, let OSX deal with it. 

 

iPhone/iPad backups can also be fairly significant. Mine are about 50Gb for example as I have all my Evernote stuff in there.

 

If you want to see how big they are, use Finder to 'Go to Folder' and enter:

 

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

 

That's where they're stored - you'll be able to see how much room they take up. I moved mine off the SSD on to a different drive.

 

As a side note, on my laptop, I use the JetDrive things to keep stuff off the SSD.

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Mac Apprentice

Mac

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Thanks for that, interesting. I cleared downloads and trash (14,000 items in there) any now I have:

 

Other: 194Gb

Backups: 88Gb

Audio: 52Gb

Movies: 42Gb

Apps: 37Gb

Photos: 21Gb

 

So Backups look significant and thanks Mac for the timely post above. I've got a Time Machine box thing (3Tb) taking constant backups so I shouldn't need too many on my local drive I shouldn't think so 88Gb of backups seems excessive. iPhone and iPad are both backed up to the Mac but the iPad has about 20Gb on it and the iPhone 30Gb - surely the backups are not exact replicas are they - surely just references to existing files (most of the stuff is music).

 

No idea how to find backups despite searching on Google. Maybe there are a load of historical backups from before I had the Time Capsule.

 

 

As a side note, where are those backups? On the local drive?

 

You can turn local snapshots off if you want...I do, but then my laptop stuff has everything elsewhere anyways.

 

Run Terminal, and then type:

 

Sudo tmutil disablelocal

 

You'll need to enter your password.

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NewNiceMrMe Newbie

NewNiceMrMe

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As a side note, on my laptop, I use the JetDrive things to keep stuff off the SSD.

 

Why have I never seen these before! :o

They look bloody brilliant. 

128gb for £64 for something as flush mounting as that is excellent.  I like that a lot.  I've ordered one on Amazon. 

 

I'll use it as a form of local back-up for my most critical stuff.

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