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In the process of upgrading to a new SSD in my iMac 2017 Catalina. After setting everything up using Disk Utility, it is asking if I want to restore from “iMacintosh HD” or “Macintosh HD - Data” I read here of someone having a similar question but his situation was slightly different. I simply want to clone my existing startup disk so I can swap out the old drive with the new one. Can anyone guide me through this?

Many thanks in advance. -JJ

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Cloning isn’t easy in my experience since you need to first learn a bit about specifics and how to select a proper clone tool tool and understand any filesystem differences between your exact versions of OS.

Why not install a fresh OS on the SSD and then when it first starts migrate everything from the old OS?

Apple tools handle this for you including all the version difference if you choose a different OS on the new disk. And with two disks, you can thoroughly test the new drive before you install it or wipe the internal drive.

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    Up to Mojave I'd say you can't go wrong with Carbon Copy Cloner [or SuperDuper] but I've no idea how either of those handle the extra partitioning of Catalina. I've had some miserable experiences with Time Machine restores/migrations of late.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 17:10
  • Super Duper and CCC are awesome, but I use them far less on the latest OS than I did in the past. We’ve done about 4,000 migrations to Mojave and Catalina at work the past 60 days and the Apple process is working very well for us.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 17:12
  • Ive tried somewhere between 5 & 10 Migrates/restores [I just lost count eventually] from a myriad TM backups in tha past year. Not one was successful. I now trust it only to keep recently deleted files, just in case.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 17:14
  • Almost none of our migrations are from Time Machine. We use it to put new hardware in place of old. The backups are only needed rarely @Tetsujin there are people with heavy local customization where this doesn’t work which makes it even more important to test before you erase
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 17:45
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    I just asked the folks at Shirt Pocket (makers of Superduper, which I own) and they unequivocally say that both volumes created by Catalina come along for the ride. So you can image your Drive and restore it to another and it will be fully bootable/identical to the source. I believe I have heard the same of CCC but wanted to check, if just for my own knowledge, for sure.
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 19:04

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