restoring to new APFS from HFS+ sparsebundl

[louabill]

So... I went and put a new SSD in my mac mini before realizing that I should have cloned the old hard drive to the new one before swapping it out.

I have a full SuperDuper! backup of the old drive to a sparsebundle image on an external drive (and I have the ungodly slow, but still functional original internal drive).

The old drive was HFS+ (spinning platters of rust). The new drive is an SSD, so it'll be APFS.

What would be the smartest way to set up the new drive to be sure that the recovery volume will be on it? I could restore from the backup or I could put the old drive in a non-Firewire enclosure.

I wish I had read the instructions first....

Thanks for any tips,

Bill

[louabill]

OK, I am starting the following before going to bed:

Put the old HFS+ drive in a USB enclosure.

Boot off the old drive.

Use SuperDuper! to restore the the old drive to the APFS-formatted new drive.

Two questions:

Will this create the recovery partition like magic, and if not, how would I be sure to have the recovery partition?

Should I have specified APFS-encrypted instead of APFS when I formatted the new drive? I'm guessing that I can turn filevault on after copying, or failing that, re-restore everything.

Once again, thanks for any tips.

Bill

[dnanian]

It looks like you answered your own question - sorry that I wasn't available at midnight to reply.

If your HFS+ volume has a recovery volume, and you're going to APFS, it will create the recovery volume for you. And using APFS is fine: just turn FileVault on in system preferences.