new drive transfer inquiry

[ambientexposure]

hey there,

so i finally have decided to purchase a newer faster drive. my boot drive with apps/files is all compiled onto a western digital 750gb.

theoretically, i would like to buy a 1tb wd black drive, partition it into 3. 1 for snow leopard boot, 1 for lion boot, & 1 for apps/files.

my question is, will i just have to suck it up & reinstall all of my apps or is there a way to use super duper or the like to just backup & transfer over to work properly?

i have never used a dual or triple partition before, but i do know how to direct the home folder to a drive or partition. will this just screw everything up or cause problems in the long run? i just want a quick boot & files kept separate & the 1tb black is in the budget at present.

thanks

 

[DanielCoffey]

SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner should do the job for you perfectly once you have the drive partitioned. That is what they are for.

 

[Macsonic]

I use Disk Utility of OSX to clone a hard drive and works fine. You may also partition first then clone.

 

[ambientexposure]

i have used ccc & sd several times as backups before, but how will it decide what goes where once i restore to the new drive, partitioned into 3 sectors?

i would rather not have 2 versions of each app, but for compatibility sake i suppose i may have to with some apps. i do know i want my old SL partition with a new lion partition to share files on the larger partition back & forth if possible.

right now i feel comfortable keeping SL just because of some app compatibility but want the option to have lion too.

 

[codymac]

Before you go this route, what do you intend to do when you need to upgrade an app to work with Lion but the upgrade will prevent it from working with Snow Leopard?

I'd be concerned with sharing your home folder across multiple OS installs of a different version with potentially different versions of apps as well.

Having one copy of an app, it seems like you'd be stuck. Seems like you see that, and are prepared for the possibility of having multiple copies, so...

If you're not ready to dive full in on Lion yet, I'd just copy the whole SL partition to another partition, upgrade it, and have a go. Basically, I'm talking about one partition with everything on it running SL, and another copy with everything on it running Lion.

You'd have to manually keep up with your files going back & forth and the more you use either, the more they'll diverge from one another, but it's a good way to test things before going all-in and the issues seem more easy to deal with to me.