Tips to fix Mac slowdowns | How to speed up a slow Mac computer

It doesn't matter whether you are at Mac or Windows or at any other OS, but, a computer , sooner or later, starts running slow. The situation goes persistent with the passage of time, specially when we load our machines almost full. Sorry to users of other OS because here we are discussing the situation for Mac only. One can try the following fixes to speed up slow Mac machine.

Try Restarting Mac

The first and the most effective step you can try is restarting your Mac. It cures mac slowdowns by quitting processes and applications running in the background. When we restart Mac machine, the RAM gets freed and refreshed to serve only the usefull applications.

Is your Internet connection OK?

Almost for everything we do at our machine, we need internet. Right from surfing the Web to checking email and writing applications—requires Internet connection. Many of us believe that a slow internet means a slow Mac. This is not correct. If you are struggling with internet speed then it doesn't mean that your Mac is slow. Improving your net connection can fix the issue.

Check Network preferences: If you see spinning beach ball in Safari, you can't say whether pages are taking longer time to load or whether your net connection is actually broken. So, need to go to Apple menu > System Preferences, and choose Network. Click Assist me and follow the instructions there after.

Free up Mac disk space

As I mentioned earlier, we keep storing our every digital stuff in Mac. A time comes when hard drive feels short of free space. This is one of the most prominent causes of sluggish Mac.


Use built-in disk usage: Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Usage . It's important to mention here that one should have at least 10 GB of free space available in drive. The limit is optimum if we maintain about 10 percent of the drive size as free space. If the free space in your Mac is below this level then you should clear some additional space.



Search for large files: Use Spotlight to locate large files that you may no longer need. In the Finder, press Command-F, click the plus (+) sign, click the Kind pop-up menu, and select Other. Select File size from the resulting list, and then click OK. Set up the criterion to read File Size and delete the files that you don't need.


Delete cache and log files: Ordinarily, cache files help your Mac run faster and the Log files keep track of past events on your Mac. For most of the users these are none of any importance and can be deleted without any adverse consequences.

The most safe and and quick way to delete these unnecessary files is to use Mac cleaning app like Stellar Speed Up Mac. The application can be applied to delete all sort of unnecessary data (duplicate files, large files, cache , leftovers, system junks), either from entire drive or from a single volume.

Check CPU usage

The task can be assigned to activity monitor to see % of CPU being consumed. Launch Activity Monitor and select My Processes from the pop-up menu at the top of the window. Next, click the % CPU column to sort by that criterion.
If an app consistently remains at top of the list of the % CPU usage, that app may be considered to quit.

Check memory usage

An OS performs with the combination of physical and virtual memory. Virtual memory is the space in Mac drive which is used temporarily. Physical memory is the RAM installed in Mac machine. Its important to note here that physical memory is faster than the virtual so, more your Mac depends on virtual memory, the slower it will perform. The swapfiles are created in virtual memory that keep increasing in size over time and can contribute to Mac slowdowns by consuming disk space. You don't need to worry or delete these files because they get cleared when system restarts.

Spend money

Money is the ultimate cure for stubborn slowdowns.



Add RAM: If your Mac doesn’t have adequate memory installed then you must go for upgrades. Its a common practice among us that we just care about upgrading OS and leave the other requirements as such. Adding RAM is the quickest and most perfect fix for slow Mac. If one can't afford or wants an alternative, then optimizing Mac is best solution for him.


Get a bigger hard drive: A larger capacity hard drive could add more speed to your snailing Mac. Shifting from an HDD to an SSD drive will be a smarter move and can help to speed up Mac applications too.


We have tested and verified the tips mentioned above believe the ideas would help you to get rid of snailing Mac performance.

Boost Mac performance by defragmenting Mac drive - how and when?

Now-a-days, slow Mac has become a common issue for Mac users. Slow Mac operations caused by fragmentation of files after the long usage of machine. Fragmentation is the process of splitting of files into parts or fragments at the time of storing them in different locations on the hard drive. When one attempts to open some application or file then accessing or fetching time gets increased as processor consumes time to search for the supported file fragments in the drive. So, by this way fragmentation of files results in slowing down the system's performance.

So, one can optimize the hard drive performance by combining fragmented parts of a file called defragmentattion. The only problem is defragmenting hard drive is a time consuming process, it can take hours but its not universal.

Although you don't need to perform it everyday. Your Mac OS X has built-in features HFS+ file system that can defragment files very smoothly but upto certain level(20MB file size). Actually, defragmentation of Mac drive is required in Mac or not has been a contradictory topic. Because, some people think that Mac has its inbuilt defragment tool, however its not true. Mac OS X has HFS+ file system of Mac that can only defrag files of size 20mb. As a result, you should only consider defragmenting an option under certain circumstances.

When to defrag Mac?

Once you realize that your Mac machine is running slow, you should check for fragmented files created on the disk because it might be a big reason for slow Mac or Slow PC.

Defrag your PC:

In your computer, there is an inbuilt tool to defrag your hard disk. To Defragment your PC drive:

Right click on My Computer -> then Select Manage -> Go to Storage -> Click on 'Disk Defragmenter'. It will show you by graphical representation the status of fragmented files and it will notify you according to fragmented level of files.

Defrag your Mac Hard disk:

Unfortunately, no inbuilt free Mac application is present for defragmentation in Mac machine. Here this means you must need to go for a third party Mac application to defragging Mac.

According to Apple research on this contradictory topic of need of defragmentation in Mac, a user should defrag his drive if he has many large files(like video files) or in case of less free space available in his drive.By defragmenting Mac drive one can optimize Mac performance and speed up his Mac like a day one.

Recommended third party software for Mac defragmentation:

Mac users have need to opt for some reliable and efficient third-party defragmenting application like Stellar Drive Defrag.

The Stellar Drive Defrag have advanced features of monitoring drive temperature and give alerts if find temperature of drive above the optimum. This software checks for frequently-used system files and keep these files together on your drive so as to decrease the time taken by processor in searching for their components while it's booting up and during running of background services.

Stellar drive defrag following operations and prominent features:

Defrag metadata : This option defrags the information (metadata) about a file. It includes file length, creation date, inter-linking information, license information etc.

Full defrag: All the files and free spaces are bring together into separate continuous memory locations.

Quick defrag: By uisng this tab, it automatically arranges the scattered pieces of files into contiguous memory locations on drive.

Optimize: This option is unique as it used to take out all the scattered free spaces from different location and place them together into a chunk of memory.

This defrag mac application with user friendly interface and capability to handle all the levels of fragmented files and hence optimizing Mac performance.

Do you need Mac cleaning application for your Mac machine?

Regularly using Mac cleaner application performs a big role in getting rid of that beach ball in your slow Mac. It also plays important role to speed up Mac performance efficiently and give you feel like you did when your Mac was brand new. These applications are required by users because these not only have a fantastic features of cleaning all unwanted junks along with many useless files and hence increase Mac performance.

In my next paragraphs, I'm going to provide you some great features that must be in suitable and reliable Mac cleaning application that might assist you to choose and find optimum one among a large number of software available in the market. So, this way you can select best Mac cleaner application and can say good bye to sluggish Mac performance.

The most fascinating thing you experience by having Mac cleaner apps is that it simply clean unneeded files and prevent your Mac from clutters. This keeps free space available in drive as well and provides enhanced speed experience to users.

Advantages of Mac cleaner software:

The easiest way to fixed sluggish Mac is actually to delete clutters, cache files,logs etc. from drive. Probably many Mac users don't realize that even after deleting some apps, there leftovers will remain in the drive.

So, in order to delete such leftovers you should clean your drive thoroughly. I think for sure like me, you also love your Mac, so, to keep it stay and working use an awesome Mac cleaner like Stellar Speedup Mac.

You should know that it's not an intelligent decision to spend a huge amount of cash over a brand new machine or Mac drive.

About Stellar Speedup Mac, I can proud to say that it not only has a large number of advanced features but as well as the fairly low price of just $29 that I think is unquestionably worthy of having.

So, if you find any of your friend facing sluggish Mac, its your duty to recommend to have this superb Mac clean up software.By using this remarkable great tool, you are able to give new life to your old sluggish Mac machine and have it working like the day one.

Believe it or not, but it can certainly help you to stop running slow and very easy to use apps.

Don't wait just Check out and download the Stellar Speedup Mac,your fastest cleaning application to get a quick clean fast Mac because this app has much more to provide apart from a cleaning action, it can be a lot more fascinating with its unique and more advanced features.

Keep Backup of your Mac to restore original data

Protection of your data against loss can be maintained by cloning entire drive in some external drive or by having Time Machine(TM) incremental backups. You must create backup which can restored, when desired, to get the original data back in their previous shape.

Friends, I am a Mac user and a big fan of Mac. Taking regular backup and cloning is a very significant task from security point of view and should be paid proper value by all the users. Because , without proper backup strategy or clone of your drive, your data can be lost any time while performing activities like reformatting,partitioning drive, drive failure,volume corruption etc. And this can happen to anyone without giving notice in advance and can cause your data to be lost.

You have only way to avoid data loss but no way to avoid these situations which cause drive failure.

When one of my friends bought Mac , I made him aware in the very beginning for taking timely backups but, he ignored it and said that cloning &backup are time taking and 'boring' processes.

Finally, he realized that without cloning Mac drive, his data is always at risk. I suggested him to see for some software like Stellar Drive Clone which can make the task of cloning very easy and fast.

Some other options for hard drive cloning are Superduper, CCC. Both of these are very popular Mac cloning tool but the only problem they don't give support to your multi boot mac machine. They don't support ExFat, FAT32 file systems and MBR like Stellar cloning application. Stellar Drive Clone also give support to SSD(Solid State Drive).

By downloading Stellar Drive Clone free trial version user can perform following things:-

• Use can Restore volume from folder
• Restore Mac volume from image file
• Create clone to any folder
• Create clone to network drive

Features available after buying software:-

• Can create clone to any volume
• Can create bootable dvd of your Mac disk
• Minimal system(create bootable clone quickly by copying only default apps)
• Can facilitate you by Imaging Mac drive or specific volume

Can I Move home folder of Mac SSD to another disk?

If you want to move home folder of your Mac OS X SSD drive to another disk than it is advisable not to try same but something similar a way better.

As you know SSDs are fast than traditional drives that is a big reason of increasing number of Mac heads is buying them. When you choose to move your home folder (full of docs, photos, songs and movies) to some external drive, they fail to understand that there’s Library in the home folder that should be left on SSD. Library is a collection of caches, settings and contains supporting files for those apps we want start up faster.

And that's not the only reason or you can say the story doesn't end here. In a big iTunes library, you might want to keep its contents like ~/Music/iTunes/ on the SSD too. (excluding iTunes Music). I said excluding iTunes music because it loads faster and you can't even see its icon bounce.

There’s a simpler way to do all this but without moving your home folder. It can be done by moving most of its contents and then use symboliclinks point to the new location. 

 

Symbolic links are created in the Terminal, and one can remember this syntax: ln -s

<where-to-link-to> or <what-to-call-it>

So let’s perform it in a form of a checklist with 7 easy steps:

The first most important step is quiting all apps and stop your Dropbox etc.

1. Open Finder to access your home folder. Now, select everything except Library in your Home folder.Now, drag all your selected content to the new storage drive.

2. After copying is done, delete everything from your home folder except for Library and Music/iTunes.

3. Open Terminal. Right now you should be in your home folder. Now start linking:  

ln -s /Volumes/StorageDisk/Downloads
You have your first symbolic link. You can look at it in Finder.

4. Now, do the same for all other content that you’ve moved: Documents, Movies, Pictures, Sites, Dropbox etc. except for the Music.

5. Finished it with #5? Now for Music, delete iTunes Music either from the Finder or Terminal doesn’t matter. Now, can create a symbolic link to iTunes Music on the storage:
cd Music/iTunesln -s “/Volumes/StorageDisk/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music”

The best part of doing this way is: you don’t need to change anything in your daily workflow. Everything is in the form to which you’re used to.

Remember to run your Dropbox again.

Note: Before moving, migrating data from one folder to another, or from one drive to another it is recommended to create clone of Mac drive using some reliable tool. Creating Copy of Mac applications using reliable software ensure you bootable clone of your programs .

Clone your Mac hard drive to avoid data loss

Many times, you would have heard to ensure your data protection from disaster by cloning your hard drive”. But, most of us ignore its importance in our personal as well as professional life. Today, in this advanced technology era, the most important thing is our – data. 

So, its not your hard drive responsibility to keep your data safe , you need to have some good cloning application for your Mac drive. So, if anything goes wrong with your data you are the only one who is responsible for it. Then you'll have to spend for some data recovery tool but remember, its not always possible to regain data completely and sometimes the loss goes permanent.

So, in order to ensure your data protection it is essential to clone your Mac disk. I can't forget the day when I lost all my stuff including documents, movies, songs and all family snaps that I took at family events, due to my drive failure. After this big loss I realized the importance of backing up plan or drive cloning.

For Mac users, Apple made backing up data easy with Time machine, in Mac OS X. Yet, majority of Mac users don't backup their data regularly because they believe that its a complicated process. 

 

But, the main problem with the majority of users is – they don't have reasonable idea of what and how to backup on Mac drive.

So, this article is explaining the difference between cloning and backup methods and how to decide that when and what to clone or backup.

           Cloning                                                             Backup

Clone is an exact copy of your Mac disk or volume to your desired destination drive or volume. It creates Bootable backups.	Backup of your drive is created in image form and used as a backup for disaster recovery purposes. Backups are not bootable.
This allows you to transfer all your content including OS and installed applications	Backups contains everything including your OS but can't create image of installed applications so you need to reconfigure or reinstall on your destination backup drive.
Cloning is less flexible. It is mainly required at the time of hard drive migration or upgradation of drive. So, we can say its a one time operation gives bootable clone that one need at critical condition when Mac is not booting.	Backup are more flexible and can be scheduled. You can recover or restore your backup from the moment that you need.

Now come to the point we were about to discuss that What should you Backup or Clone:-

To determine what data should you clone or backup, you have to just suppose a situation of losing a particular data type and feel how much it make you terrible. I think this is an easy and best approach to find out your priority wise important data.

Personal data is irreplaceable: It is obvious that personal stuff must be backed up first as it holds special place in your heart. For example: some letters to your love or parents are important to you, so backing up this is the foremost step you should do. As per my views, photos and multimedia files including video of our family events are irreplaceable or you can't be recreated if lost ones. 

 

Clone your OS or important office files :

It is important to clone Mac hard drive so that your data have been secured as a clone on external disk always. And your important files will not go anywhere even after drive failure etc. So, you need not worry about your data safety after having clone of your Mac disk.

Such confidential and important files include documents that are not backed up and lost due to some accidental deletion or error cause a big loss.

Why I need to take backup of my drive | significance of Mac cloning

Your data is vital, irreplaceble, priceless and very expensive to recover (sometimes beyond the reach of recovery). So, it is advisable to backup your Mac regularly to secure it from any loss. If you are like me then your data must contain following stuff:-

Photos (Wedding, Children, family tour,occasion)

Music

Movies

Conference talks

Documents (Business receipts, Scans of all diplomas, licenses, etc. )

Research papers etc

There are so many strong reasons why one should take atleast continuous backups using Time machine. Anytime your drive fails or can be stolen and also wiped by hackers. Infact I must say that its good to have some offsite backups also. However, here I will talk about special type of backups called 'Clone backups'.

A clone is an exact copy of your Mac drive including user data and OS files. Clone gives bootable copy which can be used to boot your Mac if the primary drive fails or gets corrupted.

Prominent reasons for why to clone Mac drive:

• It is useful In Testing Apps and Trouble shooting issues
• During replacement of Primary hard drive
• Its a great way to have functional backup of entire machine

Why your hard drive crash or failure happens? Clone Mac for data safety

We can say our hard drive is queen of our system because it consist all of your documents. It stores all files including,user files, system files and OS and all our personal and confidential stuff. we are living in computer era and today people are more concern about their data protection.

So, here question arises that is there anyway to protect our hard drive from failure or corruption - the answer is NO.

It means we can't assure that our hard drive is safe, infact we can only avoid some reasons causing drive failure or crash like overheating etc. But, we can't handle it in actual because of no control over its working mechanism and all above its a machine so can crash anytime.

Now I am going to take you beyond the basics:-

Most of us are not aware of details of hard drive although they are using it daily but without knowing that its an amazing piece of engineering. Every hard drive consist a number of circular platters, that are extremely thin and made from glass/ceramic material, spinning at 7200rpm(revolutions per minute) or more. 

 

Means when you leave your hard drive then every day, each platter of your drive will spin 3,784 million times in a year. Read/write head of your hard drive is floating just nanometers away from these platters.

These read/write heads as the name suggests are the part of your hard drive that reads and writes data to the drive.

When the head passes over the drive, the surface of the platters get magnetised in a series of 0s and 1s. So, the drive has to carry this work without crashing these read write heads into the platter because it can damage drive. 

 

According to a study on millions of drive by Google, approximately there's a one-in-three chance failure of a drive in five years of use. These figures might sound like reassuring to us - because one drive in three over five years of usage doesn't sound bad. But, this assurance can be false.

So, Google's released that nearly 3% of hard drives failed in two months. Just suppose that if your drive is one of that 3%, then without a proper backup or clone of your drive you will have lost your vital data. 

 

The only way to keep your data safe from any loss is by taking regular backups.

clone Mac is must to ensure your drive and data safety. You can minimize chances of drive failure by replacing your drive with new advanced Solid-state disks (SSDs). Mac users are mainly seen to use SSD in their Mac machine because SSD are less prone to failure. This is due to the reason that these drives don't have any moving parts like platters etc. This will suggests that these drives should be more reliable than spining disks. 

 

However, according to hardware.fr a French tech site survey of hard drive failure rates, specifically in the first few months Solid State Drives were no less prone to failure or crash than spinning conventional drive. 

 

SSDs life can be rated in terms of its write cycles and a typical Solid State Disks might be rated at 100,000 cycles. Actually a hard drives write about thousands of times in a day.

Here the conclusion is there is no such a thing that will last forever, this means that cloning should be top of your agenda.

There are several kinds of cloning apps there in the market,and which one will be suitable for you depends tottaly on your needs. My recommendations as a most complete kind of cloning tool is probably the most simple,efficient and reliable one. 

 

Recommended tool:

For Mac machines- Stellar Drive Clone(work on multiboot Mac also)

For Windows: Clonezilla

Best award for Mac cloning application: Stellar Drive Clone

As you know importance of backup and cloning your Mac drive and also about options available in industry. Users generally get confuse at the time of selecting one among several applications.

Since it is the most initial and important step towards your data safety so, you should focus on it. In Mac, Time machine(TM) is a great built in backup tool so, usually it is not suggested to go for some other third party backup apps (like superduper, CCC ).

For cloning Mac drive, one must see towards some third party cloning tool as Mac doesn't provide any cloning app. So, now lets discuss the criteria of choosing best Mac cloning apps:

1. It will be better if your software can perform both cloning and imaging processes.
2. Can create bootable copy of current Mac drive
3. Supports windows file formats also (clone window partition on Mac).
4. Should support SSD(solid state drive)
5. Backup network drive and clone Recovery HD also.
6. Should be compatible with latest Mac OS X

This video explains you details of the best Mac cloning software known as Stellar Drive Clone.

Simple Tips to get rid from slow Mac operations

If you are a Mac guy then you would have definitely encountered slow Mac operations. Slow Mac performance affects our work speed and can pull down your work efficiency. And this will become a problematic situation. The real causes behind the issue include unwanted files, junk accumulation on Mac, fragmented files, large no. of startup items and so many widgets on dashboard are some common reasons of slowing down your Mac.

Higher the frequency of editing files more are the chances to increase cache files, log, universal binaries, duplicate files etc. in your Mac which ultimately slows down Mac operations. But, this is not a permanent issue and it can be resolved just by following few simple steps.

Reconsidering the number of start up apps and Speed up software can improve your Mac performance in an easy and efficient way.

Some facts to be taken care of, to handle a slow Mac:

• Enabling only necessary services, apps and preference settings while disable unnecessary apps.
• Delete unused drive or volume hidden in Device Manager of your machine.
• For speeding up boot time one should disable unused ports.
• Clean uninstalled apps, unwanted files, duplicate files from your Mac.
• Clear cache, log files universal binaries of your Mac using Mac cleaning tool like Stellar Speedup Mac.
• Clean old and unused files or apps from my documents folder.
• After every new program installation make sure to reboot Mac OS.
• Upgrade your Mac drive by increasing its size.
• Defragment large files in your Mac.
• Monitor Apple's Activity Monitor to see the status of CPU usage, RAM and virtual memory usage that will help you in optimizing you Mac. Activity monitor allows you to see spikes to show how much memory is utilized by each apps. So, by analyzing this you can quit those apps consuming more memory as they cause other apps to run slow.
• Manage your startup items by turn off apps you don't want to open at startup. All you need to do is go to System Preferences -> System -> Users & Groups -> Login Items. Then uncheck the apps you don't want on from the startup.

Five simple steps to optimize your Mac performance

Making an old Mac run faster is like trying to speed up an old car. My Mac is only one year old but due to system junks & highly fragmented files, its speed slows down. You have to perform cleaning on your Mac in order to gain speed and increase performance of your Mac. So, make sure that you have cleaned out all the clutters & junk files from it. Defragmentation of files using some third party tool is also must to regain its lost speed.

Both these processes of cleaning and defragmentation allow your Mac to run like it was new. Here are the top five common reasons and their fixes of Mac running extremely slow.

1. Minimize Desktop items:

You are probably unaware that accumulation of lot of files on Mac desktop is one of the prominent reason for slowing down Mac performance. Because on every boot or startup your Mac OS X used to index all of the content of your desktop. It catalog the content of every folder after creating a thumbnail icon for each and every file on desktop. This process take time hence slows down other Mac operations. That is why it is advisable to keep only frequently used files on desktop.

2. Disable unused start-up apps:

In order to speed up your Mac you need to remove some apps from startup list. When your Mac is booting or at startup you might have noticed that some applications automatically opens. So, it is advisable to remove those apps that you don't often use from auto start-up option.

3 Minimize widgets on dashboard:

Several widgets and clips on dashboard utilize lots of memory and thus brings the system speed down. Minimizing unnecessary or unused widgets is an effective way to enhance fruition of your Mac.

4.Turn off unnecessary Applications:

In order to speed up your Mac you need to turn off the apps you seldom use like Bluetooth, Speech Recognition or Internet Sharing. This action of yours will not only speed up your Mac but help you to save your battery life.

5.Defragmentation of Mac drive:

After a long usage of computer, files get automatically fragmented which indirectly effects system speed and performance. In Mac, HFS+ file system have capability to defragment files but upto 20MB file size only. In case of fragmented files processor takes time in fetching files from different locations.

Stellar Drive Defrag is the best Mac defragmenting app from my point of view. It can also alert you about your hard drive by showing temperature of it. I have been using this software from two years and it gives my Mac new life.

All the above steps help you to increase Mac speed but only upto some extent. If you want to optimize your Mac performance completely than must clean your Mac by some Mac cleaning apps. You need to clear unwanted files and apps, cache log files, universal binaries etc. in order to get rid of slow Mac.

How to move Mac OS X installation to another drive | Migrating OS X to new drive

Migrating Mac OS X installation to new drive in order to upgrade it -- is a good way to improve experience with Mac.

Transferring or moving OS X or your data you will need to connect your new drive to your system first. Then you have to choose the best way among Migration Assistant and installing a fresh copy of OS X. Among both the methods, Apple recommends installation method instead of Migration Assistant because installing a fresh copy of OS X gives a clean start. It means that if there was any issue with operating system on your old Mac drive than it will be not there after fresh installation. The fresh installation cleans all the leftovers, logs that tends to increase as we use our machines.

Your new drive without these leftovers files tends to give more performance and stability. Especially for Mac OS X 10.7 and later versions of OS X, it is highly recommended to use fresh installation OS X method because these Mac OS have invisible Recovery partition which is created.

Steps to move Mac OS X to a new drive:

Step1: Install correct drive in your computer

Make sure to check your model configuration and install the drive that will compatible on it.

Step2:Ensure s way of transferring data:

As discussed above for transferring your data to new drive you will need to connect both your original and new drive to system using some device like adaptor or external enclosure. In case of laptops(single drive computer) you will need to have a device to connect old drive to your system after being installed new drive to it.

But, in rare cases if you can't connect drive externally the aforementioned steps will be slightly different. In thi case see the Important Note I have given at the end of this article.

Step3: Make sure to have current Backup and clone of your old drive

Before begin the process of upgrading make sure to take backup of your data on an external drive. And it is recommended to take clone Mac hdd including installed apps and OS using software like Stellar Drive Clone. This will keep you stress free if any unlikely event of data loss occur during the process of upgradation.

Step4: Install your new designated drive:

Now, you should install your new checked drive in your Machine.

Step5: Connect old drive externally:

Here connect your old drive as discussed in step 2 to external enclosure or using the appropriate cable.

Step6: Boots up to installation disc or Recovery HD

Those having 10.6 or earlier just boot to your installer. For users running Mac OS X 10.7 or later can boot to Recovery HD by holding cmd+R keys during startup.

Step7: Formating on new drive:

To format your new drive use Mac inbuilt Disk Utility find in Utilities menu. Open Disk Utility, select your new drive from left pa of Dis utility and then click on Erase tab onn the right side. Now, set the Format to “Mac OS Extended Journaled” which is recommended format to Mac OS machines.

Step8: Install OS X on new drive:

After formatting the drive, closing disk utility itself take you to the installation process in case you have 10.6 or earlier versions. But, if you have 10.7 or later, then from Mac OS X utilities you need to select “Reinstall Mac OS X” option.

Now, all you need to do is just follow on screen instructions. But, make sure to choose your new drive as the install location for Mac OS X. As the process is automated so you can do any of your task instead of waiting for installation.

Step9: Transferring data using Migration Assistant:

After installation o OS X on new drive you have to complete some final steps by through some prompts point to Migration assistant. Otherwise you can find Migration Assistant in application-> Utilities folder of your Mac. Run this apps and select the option to tranfer data and click continue.

You can select or deselect items like user information,folders and apps that you want to transfer over another drive. After selecting these click “transfer” button. Now time it will take depend on the amount of data you are transferring and on media of tranfer.

Step11: Run software update:

Go to Apple menu-> select software update on your new installation and run updates avilable for version of OS X or other updates.

Step12: Repir Disk Permissions using Disk Utility:

Open Disk utilty in aaplication folder inside utilities. Select your new drive in left hand pane of disk utility and click on 'First aid tab' -> click 'Repair Disk Permissions'.

Step13: You are DONE!

After double check your drive to make sure data came correctly you can delete datat from old drive and can used it for other purpose.

Step 14: SPECIAL NOTE...

If anyhow you can't attach your old drive externally you can do this by creating a clone of your original drive or if you have time machine backup(that you can use in place of your original drive). Only you have to perform a variation after step 4.

• Create a clone using Stellar Drive Clone application(gives bootable clone) to external drive.
• Clone Mac is easy and fast process and can be achieved in running Mac.
• After Step 4 upto 13, just use cloned external drive instead of original drive while performing above steps.
• If you have Time machine backups than you can use it in place of original drive and transfer data using Migration assistant.

Cloning Tool to transfer my Mac OS X from one machine to another

I am a Mac user and according to my experience one very common and frequently asked question that Mac OS X users have is "How to copy or transfer Mac OS X installation from one hard drive/machine to another?" 

 

So, users search the question in two cases:

1. Those who bought a new (larger) hard drive example: SSD,Hybrid drives need to move their data from old drive to new one.

2. In case of Mac users who have bought a new Mac machine and need to transfer Mac OS X and all system files and applications from their old Mac machine to the new one.
 

So, you can move your Mac OS X, and all installed applications and files by cloning (not copying), from one machine to another so that it should boot up and work properly. Now, here you should ask why I said to 'clone' instead of copying, why we can't do this by simply copying. This is because unlike Mac OS 9, where you have to just drag and drop by selecting all your files and copying them to the connected drive or another machine. 

 

Problem: While copying app by finder and Terminal:

• It requires special tools to do this job.

• There are many invisible files in Mac OS X. Recovery HD of OS X Lion and mountain Lion is also hidden and therefore can't be copied by Finder.

• Sometimes infact we can't assure that all files will be copied because of some permissions issues in Mac OS X.

Copying Using Terminal: 
 

In these situations, Terminal can help you. 
Using commands over this you can copy each and every single file to your preferred location. However, mostly people don't use this method because it is hard to learn a list of commands and its also time taking process. 

 

Another most preferred and recommended approach is using third party cloning tool. And in this case, Stellar Drive Clone utility from Stellar is famous for its additional feature to provide you bootable clone of your Mac drive including Recovery HD. 

 

Now, question arises that how to use Stellar Drive Clone to transfer all of your Mac drive contents including installed applications, files,OS etc to another drive or to another Mac machine.

Now, here is the details to transfer Mac data from one drive/Machine to another using Stellar Drive Clone.

For Transferring Mac OS X between Mac's using Stellar Drive Clone application:

• The easiest transfer media is to use firewire cable which should be available at any electronics store or computer store.
• Connect firewire cable into firewire port on your both machines(old and new).
• Start your old machine normally.
• Hold down T key on keyboard while pressing power button until you see the firewire symbol on the screen of your machine.
   
• Launch Stellar Drive Clone apps in your Mac.
• Click on clone&imaging and then select 'Disk clone'.
• Now, select your old machine as source drive and new mac drive as destination drive in order to create clone of all content, apps of old drive to new drive.
• By this way you can create bootable disk of your old drive at your desired new drive in a fast and efficient manner.

Secure Your Data by Creating a Replica of Your Hard Drive

Macs are undoubtedly one of the most robust operating systems that are secure against viruses and less prone to file system corruption. However, this does not mean Mac machines never encounter data loss. Indeed, Mac users also come across situations where the invaluable data stored on their hard drive becomes inaccessible or gets lost. Therefore, it is suggested to take backup of your hard drive data irrespective of the operating system used on it.

Data backup is considered as one of the most efficient methods to restore data in various cases of data loss. Therefore, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and later versions come with a utility called ‘Time Machine’ that creates backup of your entire data, including system files, emails, photos, applications, movies, documents, etc. 

This efficient utility of Mac OS X is simple to use as you just need to attach the drive on which you want to the back up and configure ‘Time Machine’ to use it. The reason why ‘Time Machine’ is different from any other backup utility is it not only copies Mac drive with all its files, but remembers how your machine looked like at any given time. In this way, you can create hourly backup of your hard drive for past 24 hours, daily backups for past month, and weekly backup until your backup drive is full.

However, you can take the benefit of ‘Time Machine’ only when you are a user of Mac OS X 10.5 or later Mac version. Moreover, you may sometime find out that the process is time-consuming and tedious for you. If you experience any of these situations, then use of a professional software to clone Mac is often recommended.

These tools are generally known as drive cloning utilities. As their name suggests, i.e. clone tools, they create a replica of your entire hard drive to an external drive. However, the destination drive must have free space equal or more than that of the source drive. Moreover, it is suggested not to save anything on the destination drive as the cloning process overwrites everything present on it.

An efficient cloning utility enables its users to resize the destination drive to reuse all the remaining space on it, which could be wasted otherwise. Apart from this, some reliable tools give you option to create the bootable DVD of your system and set the preferences for personalizing the end task activities.

According to your requirement, you can create the backup copy of your entire Mac hard drive with any of the two above mentioned methods.