External backup ideas for an old MBP 17?

[MacBook17]

I posted a thread, earlier today, over on the Macbook Pro board, but I'm not having much luck with getting responses, so I'll try making a few changes and posting here, instead.

We own an early-2011 MacBook Pro 17 (MBP 17). Apart from a couple of HDD malfunctions, early on, we've been happy with the machine for many years now. This being the case, we never had much reason to worry about a disc image for restore purposes...until now, that is. You see, we recently started experiencing -- what I now know as -- the all-too-common 2011 MBP AMD GPU failure issue. This being the case, we would like to address making a disc image that can be restored to a newer Mac machine before we lose our video entirely.

Our MBP 17, which we purchased new, came with (3) USB 2.0 ports, (1) FireWire 800 port and, most importantly, (1) Thunderbolt 2011 [aka, TB 1] port. Considering that the old TB 1 port on this machine still has some pretty respectable specifications, we would like to find an external storage device that's compatible with our TB 1 port, but will still be useful with newer/faster interfaces like TB 3 and/or USB 3.1 Gen 2 interfaces.

If anyone has any suggestions about cables, adapters and, more to the point, external drives that would serve us well with newer Mac machines, we would certainly appreciate the advice...

...and I know that this will date us pretty badly, but will newer Mac machines -- like the Mac Mini, for instance -- even operate using a disc image from our old MBP 17? Can the newer SSDs be formatted to operate with our version of OS X (El Capitan 10.11.6)?

Any thoughts on converting from an old MBP 17 to a modern Mac machine would also be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

 

[Boyd01]

You don't say how large the disk is. I assume it isn't too big on a machine of that age. IMO, you would be wasting money on a thunderbolt disk. For starters, I'd just get a USB disk and use Time Machine (which you already have) for a full backup. It might take awhile with USB 2, but so what? It would be best to get two disks and do two backups, just in case.

You could also get another disk and use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone which will be a full copy of everything that can even be booted from (on a machine that supports El Capitan). But if you are upgrading to a new Mac, you won't want to copy the operating system. Time machine is good for that, it will copy everything that is compatible (like your files, settings and passwords) but not the incompatible system.

Anyway, if you get USB 3 disks, they will be inexpensive and compatible with your new machine. If the disk has a USB-C interface, it will be fast enough on a new Mac - you could consider something like a Samsung T5 or T7 SSD if you are really interested in speed on a new Mac. And yes, if you format a SSD as MacOS Extended (HFS+) that will be compatible with a new Mac. After you are all settled on a new Mac and have restored the backup, you could always reformat it as APFS if you like.

 

[Fishrrman]

I answered your question in the first thread.

 

[Boyd01]

I posted a thread, earlier today, over on the Macbook Pro board, but I'm not having much luck with getting responses, so I'll try making a few changes and posting here, instead.

Moderator Note: It's against forum policy to start multiple threads on the same topic. @Fishrrman 's post is a good example of why such a rule exists, it gets confusing when people are trying to answer the same question in two places. I see there are quite a few replies to the other thread as well, so I'm closing this thread.

Responses can be directed here:

Looking for an external drive for TB1 and beyond?

First things first, here's what we're working with: MODEL: Early-2011 MacBook Pro 17 PROCESSOR: 2.3 GB Intel Quad-Core i7 OS: El Capitan 10.11.6 RAM: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR 3 HDD: SATA 750 GB (450 GB of free space) Although it had to be returned to Apple twice for warranty HDD failures (early on)...

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