Upgrading HDD?

so i can find different ways of easily copying the stuff on my mackbook to a new internal HDD but how does one copy the OS to the new inter HDD. Am i stupid and it is also click and drag. i wouldn't think that it would be that easy. the reason why i want to switch out the HDD is because i am a photographer and have thousands of photos on my laptop, that i need to keep with me. also a couple of thousand MP3's. when i bought my mackbook mid 2006 it came with a 80gb HDD, of course only a couple of weeks after i purchased it that upgraded the model to a 160gb HDD. i was looking at up grading the HDD and Memory. Maybe 320gb HDD and 2 gigs of ram. My main ? is still how to copy the OS?

can anyone help?

Phillyfoto

Programs like SuperDuper ans Carbon Copy Cloner can copy all your stuff over and make the new disk fully bootable

louishen said:

Programs like SuperDuper ans Carbon Copy Cloner can copy all your stuff over and make the new disk fully bootable

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Yup, those two seem to be the most popular and easier to use.

On another note, do you backup your photos? A friend of mine is a wedding photographer and decided to keep close to 60GB of pictures on an external hard drive he borrowed from me. The drive decided to take a permanent vacation. Data recovery was in the neighborhood of $2,700ish. Real big nightmare. =|

Now everything is backed up on redundant media and nothing ever stays on the main hard drive without having a secondary copy.

PS. With cameras getting more sophisticated, ie. 21MP Canon 5D MKII, shooting in RAW will eat up HDD space real fast. I witness firsthand yesterday while helping him shoot a wedding as a second shooter, we filled up a couple 2-4GB cards in less than 30 minutes and by the end of the night had no choice but to switch to JPEG. Get the 500GB drive if you can and invest in the future.

are you talking about a 500gb external or internal? i was thinking about a 250 would probibly be more than enough. any HDD you guys would recommend?

when you have finished doing any adjustments or editing the photos it is best to store them as LZW compressed TIFFs, although Max quality JPEGs are also a good option as both file formats retain any meta data.

Keeping the RAW files is not really an option (LZW TIFF is lossless anyway) or you plan to have almost unlimited and redundant storage

i have a 320gb passport external HDD, and i keep most photos on there. i shoot mostly in jpeg because for what i do i dont need to shoot in raw for the most part.

Do you have a Time Machine backup of your computer? If so, you can simply copy from that as well when you install the new hard drive. That's what I did with this MacBook I'm currently using. I installed the new hard drive, reinstalled Leopard, and when it prompted me, I just selected the option to copy my data from my Time Machine backup. It worked great.

yea i do have leopard.

Phillyfoto said:

are you talking about a 500gb external or internal? i was thinking about a 250 would probibly be more than enough. any HDD you guys would recommend?

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Some sort of redundancy. Doesn't have to be on a HDD, but any form of media you can use to backup. After that incident, I do not trust storing anything on one HDD.

J.Fo said:

Do you have a Time Machine backup of your computer? If so, you can simply copy from that as well when you install the new hard drive. That's what I did with this MacBook I'm currently using. I installed the new hard drive, reinstalled Leopard, and when it prompted me, I just selected the option to copy my data from my Time Machine backup. It worked great.

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so, will winXP in the bootcamp be restored as well from Time Machine?

is it possible to use one of these copy apps to a external and then back to a new internal drive?

Phillyfoto said:

is it possible to use one of these copy apps to a external and then back to a new internal drive?

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If you make disk image of the software from the original disk you can.