How to Clone Your Old Drive to New SSD in macOS for MacBook Pro, etc.

In this video, I'll show you how to clone your old hard drive to a new SSD after you upgrade your MacBook Pro. This will copy your old macOS, applications, and files to your new SSD drive.

What you need: 1 of the following:
Here's a USB to SATA Adapter:
or
USB to SATA Enclosure:

Installing macOS

Installing macOS from a thumb drive

Other parts and tools for upgrading MacBooks:

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[macmcneil]

Worked flawlessly on my MacBook Pro 2012 running Catalina and WOW what a difference! It flies now. Apart from intensive graphics - no gpu - this will serve us for years to come. Thanks so much!

[songsan]

Thanks so much for this great video. Discover your channel about a week ago and watched many of your videos as I follow along upgrading a few of my older mac minis.

I added a 1TB WD NVME to a 2014 Mac Mini. It kept getting stuck trying to use Time Machine of the backup to restore. Installing a fresh install of Monterey still take about 30 mins and then it stop. This morning I follow this video to just go through the cloning process and it took about 8 minutes and after changing the NVME as the startup disk everything is perfect.

Save me so much time and hassle from your videos. Thanks.

[mrdhksan]

Thanks. Just wondering why we can ‘ignore’ the “Untitled - Data partition” on the original drive.

[dblazer]

Nice, simple, easy to follow instructions. Worked perfectly.

[KNOWLEDGELEARNED]

I wanna thanks you so much for this I just finished up on this one and it took me a whole year because I had a faulted ssd and got a newer one yesterday and it got completed the same way yours did and I’m so happy with it I’m glad I stayed in the game and quitters never win

[exiledwolfch]

Just in time, I upgraded my 2012 Macbook to an ssd .. it still works fine for my Devops job thanj you!

[mando]

Thank you so much. I had done this using other software and never using Disk Utilities. It worked perfect. Cool little project for my son and I. Thanks again.

[FROILANDRES]

Thanks for the video! Just to add that In the case your Original Storage is ENCRYPTED, you must first Mount and Unlock it by typing your Log-in password before Restoring.

[jonsanserino]

Well done - Now I can do this for my friend even though I am a PC guy. You show how easy it is.

[davidngo]

Nice video, simple and easy to follow.Thank you so much

[czetanm]

How reliable is this method? Can we do this on the old HDD where the MacOS is installed? I want to swap it with a SSD? I am a musician with a lot of programs & plugins and other important data on the HDD partition where the MacOS is installed. Do not want to risk any of the data to get in to issues later while running the programs. Since i am regularly running into less space & speed issues with my 2012 MBP pro i would want to swap out the old HDD. Unfortunately this 2012 MBP pro is the best out there do not want to buy the new laptops. I feel they are not sturdy enough for my rough use as a performing artist.

[rajajmera]

Hi!
After i go macOS utilities...and select Disk Utility, nothing happens...can't select continue...what to do?

[AncestryOfficial]

Would This work from an imac Hard drive to a macbook pro? I tried just swaping it but the "laptop" features of the macbook pro like the light keyboard were gone

[jonathanranes]

I'm doing exactly what you said but then getting restore process has failed after

[stevesloan]

Regarding the restore progress-bar, could you possibly go to the top menu an choose window, bring to front. 😊

[rbnjr]

If the old drive was in the machine and a new drive in your hand start clone process. not sure why you removed the old drive .

[siamak]

Thank you. I know this an old video. This was exactly need it to do.

[alexseleznioff]

My iMac has a 1TB HDD and i have 2 partitions .. 1 with MacOS High Sierra 500GB and 1 with WIndows 10 Pro... how can i clone this disk to SSD 1TB ... please inform me Thanks .

[guipe]

I followed the instructions, but the cloning process fails for some reason
in my Macbook Pro 13 mid 2012. The new SSD is Verbatim 512 gb.

[garyjene]

I have a 256 gb ssd in my mac already. But I want to use a 128 gb nvme to copy the 256 to. Everything that is on the ssd is less than the 128. But in your video you make reference to an ssd that is equal in size to the hdd that you want to copy. The reason I want to clone the ssd is so that I can upgrade the os from Sonoma to Sequioa. I just want to make sure that if all else fails with Sequioa, I can reinstall Sonoma.