Ok let me try and sketch the situation;
Hardware MacBook Pro 17 inch (Early 2011), 1x 750 GB HDD + 1x 140 GB SSD
OS Lion
Just after I purchased my MacBook Pro I swapped the 750 GB drive for the 140 GB SSD and that worked well for a while. Obviously this setup was a bit limited in terms of drive space especially since I started using the machine privately and for work through the use of Parallels virtual machines. I removed the optical drive and installed the old 750 GB drive to provide the additional space.
Now here is where it gets a bit messy. Because I wanted to use this machine for work, I decided it would be a good idea to turn on drive encryption (for the 750 GB HDD but not the SSD) using Lion which was easy. But then, a while later and in my infinite wisdom, I moved the /Users directory from the SSD to the HD and that's where the trouble began.
Now I want to make a clean start and copy all data to my 1TB USB 2.0 and then rebuild the entire machine using the Lion recovery flash drive which I already have.
My plan was as follows:
- Boot OS X into Recovery Mode
- Log in as test user (that I won't need after cleanup)
- Open Terminal
- su to root
- rsync -avz /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD /Volumes/1TBHD/Backup_MacHD
- rsync -avz /Volumes/Data /Volumes/1TBHD/Backup_DATA
- Disk Utility --> Format HDD --> Format SSD
- Reinstall OS
- Reboot to newly installed OS
- Try and piece it back together using data from /Volumes/1TBHD
I got as far as 6 but when I checked user and group ownership I already noticed some discrepancies... not a great start as I had thought that rsync -avz as root would certainly preserve that sort of stuff.
What I am looking for is confirmation that the above is workable or even better, a more straight forward and success assured approach.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and give me your thoughts and suggestions!