Restoring replaced hard drive with SD Clone

[Macworthy]

I feel like this needs to be made into a sticky please!

How do I get the SD clone to the new hard drive on my iMac?

I read here in a post from November about holding down option while powering up, it came to three icons, one being my clone, when I click on it, I think it's just mounting to the iMac. I can see all my stuff but it's hasn't transferred anything. The post talked about using the Smart Update, where is that?

How do I get it to transfer all the data?

Thanks, Sandy

[Macworthy]

Am I suppose to open Disk Utility/Hard Drive/Restore and then select my SD Clone as the source and the destination being the Mactintosh HD?

Nothing else checked off?

[dnanian]

Well, this is in the User's Guide, which is why it's not a 'sticky'. But, you simply boot from the backup and then use "Restore - all files" with "Smart Update" or "Erase, then copy" from the backup (the startup drive, at this point) to the new drive.

Once done, you'll boot from it with the startup disk preference pane.

[Macworthy]

Thanks Dave.

I didn't realize "Smart Update" is the same as the SuperDuper! window that is used. I'm looking all over for something with that name. It's been 4 yrs since my last hard drive failure so I've gotten lax with the SD terminology!

[dnanian]

"Smart Update" is the "During copy" choice in the Options page...fortunately, SuperDuper only has a few options to choose from here, so it shouldn't be too hard to get going. :)

[Macworthy]

Yeah, in the SD window I selected-
"Copy": My Clone (name of my cloned backup)
"To": Macintosh HD
"Using": restore all files.

When it was done I just ejected the external hard drive with the clone on it and restarted the iMac. It seems to have everything restored.

Out of curiosity, why would I,

"Once done, you'll boot from it with the startup disk preference pane."

versus just restarting? Is that to make sure it's rebooting to the correct start up disk?

[dnanian]

Because if you don't set it as the startup disk, it won't default to that, and will always be looking for the old default. (Alternatively, you can set one of the "On successful completion" options, but I was trying to point you to a system feature most people should know about.)