Flashes of Panic

I win. Here’s the recipe.

• One MacBook with stock “120GB” hard disk. (We all know it’s not really 120GB of actual capacity, of course, but it’s a nice round number.) The one I had handy had less than 2GB of free disk space.
• Two Western Digital MyPassport Essential portable hard drives, 320GB nominal capacity.
• One pretty good How-To article.
• A few tools.

Result:

• One MacBook with 189GB of free disk space
• One external HDD formatted for Time Machine automatic backups
• One 120GB external HDD which has some tool marks on the case and has the complete contents of the MacBook on the disk…

Basically, you copy the boot volume of the MacBook to one of the hard disks, then open the case and swap the disks inside between the external drive and the laptop. It helps that the MacBook is one of the easiest laptops for HDD access I’ve ever met, but thanks to the details provided in the article, the hardest part of the process was just copying the old data from the drive. The actual open-cases time was less than ten minutes.

And one of the reasons that took as long as it did was that I did it twice: once to the external drive I’ve been using as the repository of my occasional backups all along, and then a second time to the new drive destined for the MacBook.

I’m not sure whether I’ll zero out the old drive from the MacBook and sell it in its external case (with full disclosure of its history, of course) or keep it, but the total cost of the upgrade was pretty good, and having another drive which will hopefully make keeping regular backups easy was a bonus.

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