Creating a "Twin" iMac from a different year iMac?

[JamesD96]

I am wondering if it is possible to back up a mac, then use that back up on a different mac to make a twin.

The end goal is to update the OS on my late 2012 iMac from 10.8.5 to 10.9.5.

I have a mid 2011 iMac and a late 2013 iMac at my disposal, each running on 10.9.5.
Also, I don't want to upgrade to Yosemite or higher.

My thought process is since I am having issues finding a Mavericks installer online, I could use a backup of a different iMac that has this OS to "update" my mac.

My files are all backed up on USB storage so that is not an issue

Many thanks

James

 

[DeltaMac]

Check in your App Store, then the Purchased tab. If you find "OS X Mavericks" in your Purchased list, you can download to your Mac. It will automatically launch when the download completes. Quit the installer. The installer app is in your Applications folder, so you can save that to another drive to keep it.
Make a USB flash drive from that Mavericks installer. There's several versions for how to do that, or you can just download the DiskMakerX app, which will create a USB installer for you, if you don't care to go into your Terminal.
If your get DiskMakerX, you would want the older DiskMakerX versions from this page

 

[JamesD96]

Thank you!
[doublepost=1486065594][/doublepost]Mid download, I realized, why not sign into the app store of the 10.8.5 iMac and download it from there? There shouldn't be an issue with this, right?

 

[CoastalOR]

Mid download, I realized, why not sign into the app store of the 10.8.5 iMac and download it from there? There shouldn't be an issue with this, right?

Using the 10.8.5 iMac to download 10.9.5 from Purchased section of your Apple account in the App Store will work fine.

Just make sure you have a fresh backup of your system BEFORE installing a OS upgrade.

 

[MacUser2525]

I am wondering if it is possible to back up a mac, then use that back up on a different mac to make a twin.

The end goal is to update the OS on my late 2012 iMac from 10.8.5 to 10.9.5.

Since no one actually answered the question. Yes that will work fine two ways to go about it boot into the recovery partition on the machine you want to make twin of use disk utility to male a copy of the internal hard disk onto external usb drive using its restore function. Second way download Carbon Copy Cloner use the internal drive as source external drive as destination and choose the all files option and clone. Whichever method you choose to clone the "master" machine reverse it on spare machine having booted off the external drive to place its contents on the internal then you have identical machines once done copying and booted into new to it install. This is how I keep my machines in sync all the time, once every couple of weeks I fire up CCC and clone then boot from clone and install onto spare machine(s) from my main master install as I like to think of it as. This is in addition to the bootable clone CCC makes every morning at 06:15 am using its schedule a cloning function.