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Old 05-21-2021, 03:57 PM
jefferyn jefferyn is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: los angeles
Posts: 8
Hi Dave,

thank you for your reply!
i was going to post another thread about the current situation, e.g. the short term solution...

i don't completely understand the step of transferring the OS installation from the hard drive on one computer to the hard drive on another computer. i started there before but, superduper has notes about copying only recommended data and not all the "system specific" files, so tired the disk utility and the route of the sparsebundle backups.

apologies in advance. there is a lot of information because i have multiple computers and external drives and partitions.

i am playing musical chairs with the drives and data. i've moved drives around. installed a new 2TB SSD in one of my computers. moved the old hard drive (HFS+) into an external enclosure. one computer has a 1TB SSD, the other computer has the new 2TB SSD, both APFS.
i am trying to transfer the contents of the 1TB computer to the 2TB computer.
then, i will transfer the contents of the now external hard drive to the 1TB computer.
the computers have different data and are used for different things. so it is just a mater of migrating data around. my user data is on a separate partition and i'm only dealing with the OS partition on each computer.

in addition to these drives above, i have everything backed up on the 2 external drives. my external drives have a bootable partition and data is backed up to other partitions with mostly sparsebundles. so LOTs of copies. everything boots.
also, i feel like i need to see that these backups work, or i'm wasting my time with these backups...

in the computer with the new SSD, i already used SD to mirror the user partitions between the 2 computers. so my user data is transferred. i'm only working on the root partitions.
initially, i was trying to copy the root partition from the computer with the older drive to the computer with the newer drive. superduper has notes about copying only recommended data and not all the "system specific" files, so tired the disk utility.
and i eventually went the route of the sparsebundle backups.

if superduper doesn't actually transfer all the files, e.g. omits "system specific files", i'm not sure how to mirror my system.
sorry i've i'm being dumb about this. i think there are a lot of options with so many copies of data.
what do you suggest?

any suggests appreciated.
jeffery

-- if needed, my partition/backup approach

i have multiple copies of my data.
i am working with 2 MBPros of the same model and same OSes for the moment. i use the 2 computers for different things and they have entirely different data. one computer is my working computer, the other is my media server, music, audio books, sinks to my iPod, etc.
I also have 2 external hard drives with multiple partitions. I partition my internal drives as "root" and "user". i follow this practice because i learned to do this as a unix sysadmin in the late 80s and early 90s. it greatly simplifies OS gymnastics and user data backups and restores. also very significant, if the user partition fills up, it doesn't kill the computer, i can log into a separate admin account with it's home directory on the root partition and deal with the full user partition. ipod/iphone backups have unexpected consumed the 10's of GB unexpectedly and cause problems. etc. the home directories are on the "user" partition. the OS is on the root partition.
in my external drives, i have a boot partition (root), a partition which i mirror the user partition of my working computer, and a partition for sparcebundles and archives. i backup the internal root partition to a sparse bundle on the partition for images an archives. i also use this to keep archives in sparsebundles when migrating from one os to the next so i can roll back if needed. so i have a number of sparse images there, some only user data and some with snapshots of OSes. because i keep a snapshot of they user partition, it is not tied to or dependent upon OS releases. and i have rolled back OS sometimes and don't have any issues with user files. i have the scheme replicated on both external drives.
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