Swapping SSDs preserving all applications

[Pandamonium]

Problem: Two machines; want to swap SSDs. I'm in town for a few days. Some of my original install disks are here (snow leopard), some of them are out of state (office, parallels etc).

My wife's old Macbook (2008 unibody aluminum. Macbook 5,1) contains a 512GB Samsung 830 running 10.6.8.
My MBP (mid-2010 15") contains an Intel 320-series 160GB SSD running the most updated version OS X.

I have a Synology NAS with sufficient free space and a USB 2 drive enclosure at my disposal.

Is there any way to directly image these SSDs onto each other so that I don't need to reinstall everything? Or am I going to have to worry about alignment or some other complexity like that?

 

[Zaap]

If I'm understanding you correctly: you want to take that 512 out of the 2008 MB and put it in the 2010 MBP- only have it running the same OS and apps as are currently on the 160GB IBM? ANd then vice-versa?

If so, that's definitely do-able. You'll need an external USB enclosure though.


What I would do:

Download CarbonCopyCloner. http://www.bombich.com/ (The trail is fully functional for 30 days).

Spend a little time going through the CCC tutorial just to get an overview on how to use it- you can have it clone everything, or just the working system and select applications.

In your case, you of course have to make sure the 512GB drive doesn't create an image that's too large to be restored to the 160GB drive. If the drive is nearly full, you may have to exclude contents in the User's folder, etc.

Backup any critical files to the NAS. Especially if you need to exclude anything from the clone images.

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make fully bootable clone images of both systems to either the USB2 drive or the NAS.

The tricky part: restoring the cloned backups to opposite hard drives.

The simplest way I know of: extract the 512GB drive, put it in a USB enclosure (like one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA2C50SK1082) being certain that all your user data is backed up from it... then restore the bootable 160GB image to the 512GB drive.

Take the 512 out of the external enclosure, swap it into the 2010 MBP and it should boot the same OS, same apps, just now from the 512GB drive.

This done, you can do the same procedure to restore the image from the 512GB drive back to the 160GB drive (obviously only if the image is actually smaller than 160GB).

 

[Rakehellion]

Problem: Two machines; want to swap SSDs. I'm in town for a few days. Some of my original install disks are here (snow leopard), some of them are out of state (office, parallels etc).

My wife's old Macbook (2008 unibody aluminum. Macbook 5,1) contains a 512GB Samsung 830 running 10.6.8.
My MBP (mid-2010 15") contains an Intel 320-series 160GB SSD running the most updated version OS X.

I have a Synology NAS with sufficient free space and a USB 2 drive enclosure at my disposal.

Is there any way to directly image these SSDs onto each other so that I don't need to reinstall everything? Or am I going to have to worry about alignment or some other complexity like that?

Open Disk Utility and make a copy of the disk. It's in your utilities folder.

 

[Childs]

Open Disk Utility and make a copy of the disk. It's in your utilities folder.

Yup, this is probably easiest. Do new disk image from folder. You can also mount the target volume on the machine you want to clone and use asr. Do "man asr", but essentially its "asr --source <path to volume> --target <path to volume> --erase".