Restore from encrypted drive

Hi There,

My macbook pro has been running like a dog since I upgraded to Lion - I have bought a new SSD hard drive and was planning on doing a new install of Lion - then putting the current hard drive in a enclosure to restore the apps/data.

However I just thought - my current hard drive is encrypted with file vault, so if I put it in an external enclosure and access it, will I be able to restore? or should I remove the encryption before I start and save myself some pain?

Any help appreciated!

Remove the encryption first as it will be faster. You can always re-encrypt later if you feel the need to do so once the SSD has been installed. Also, it's not recommend to clone the data from the spindle drive to the SSD. Install everything on the SSD fresh. The best way to do that is make a Time Machine backup first and restore from it.

Thanks for fast reply - I have a time capsule time machine backup, but experience states its mega slow to restore from that - my plan was to give a clean install of lion, then install data/apps as appropriate - so you think that is not the right way?

No, that will work fine. It's really up to you which data is important and what needs to be restored. What you suggest will certainly work OK.