I have a Mid 2014 Retina Macbook Pro (MacbookPro11,1
), running latest Big Sur. I want to upgrade to a 1TB SSD. I bought a compatible SSD from OWC, so my question is what's the best way to get all my stuff over onto it? Seems like there are three possibilities:
- Clone existing SSD to new one, enlarge partitions, then boot to it. I don't think I can do this, because I don't have the special proprietary SSD enclosure to mount it (and they're like $60 for something I'll use once). Also I'm not sure this will work due to Big Sur's system partition signing.
- Back up existing SSD to a HFS-formatted external drive (I have a 2TB rotating drive in a USB 2 enclosure I can use for this), swap in new SSD, install MacOS fresh (from a recovery drive?), then restore apps & data from backup.
- Back up existing SSD to external drive with CCC, swap out SSD, boot to backup drive, then restore to new SSD using CCC. This seems unlikely to work due to Big Sur's system partition signing.
If I use option 2, is it best to use Time Machine & restore from that? Or use Carbon Copy Cloner and then Data Migration? And also how do I install MacOS on the new SSD? I'm guessing I create a bootable USB recovery drive and use that.