I will be downloading the entire contents (800 GB) of my old iMac into my new SSD external hard drive, and I just want to be sure that I don't overlook anything important. Will one click do it, or are there any special procedures/safeguards that are important and should be observed
iMac 27″, macOS 10.15
Downloading is a term for grabbing stuff off the internet and putting it on your machine.
If you have nothing on the external SSD, and enough capacity to do so, a clone with Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner is probably the easiest thing to do. It will also ensure that whatever machine the drive is connected to will at minimum be able to use a migration assistant to copy the information, if not boot from it, as long as the system is the same or older than what can run on that machine.
You can also link the computer directly to the older machine that you intend to add the data from the SSD on, and clone the new machine later with the content.
Move content to a new Mac - Apple Support
It really all depends how healthy the old Mac is. If it is on the last legs, yes, cloning to the SSD makes more sense, because then you aren't dependent on tripping over bad blocks during the migration.
Downloading is a term for grabbing stuff off the internet and putting it on your machine.
If you have nothing on the external SSD, and enough capacity to do so, a clone with Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner is probably the easiest thing to do. It will also ensure that whatever machine the drive is connected to will at minimum be able to use a migration assistant to copy the information, if not boot from it, as long as the system is the same or older than what can run on that machine.
You can also link the computer directly to the older machine that you intend to add the data from the SSD on, and clone the new machine later with the content.
Move content to a new Mac - Apple Support
It really all depends how healthy the old Mac is. If it is on the last legs, yes, cloning to the SSD makes more sense, because then you aren't dependent on tripping over bad blocks during the migration.
Your definition is not the only one. There are others. This one is from Merriam Webster: to transfer (data, files, etc.) from one location (such as a large computer or the cloud) to another (such as a smaller computer, smartphone, or storage device)
I don't understand some of your comments, but I'll investigate SuperDuper or CCC to see what you're talking about. Oh, I just remembered, someone told me that I should use Apple's "Time Machine" for downloads.
I don't want to transfer everything in my old computer to the new one, and downloading it into my SSD will give me the time to select what I want to transfer. (Time is a factor, because my old iMac could go at any time. Untimely demises is the story of my Mac history.)
Perhaps it will also enable me to organize the material better. I haven't used Time Machine for several years because it never helped me to find anything I was looking for. In this connection I have high hopes for "Neofinder." I have the impression that it is very good for conducting searches.
Thinking further about the matter, it seems that I need some app(s) to do the following: (1) Download files from my iMac into my SSD. (2) Organize files in my SSD or computer (3) Find files in my SSD or computer. Now, it may be that one application can do them all fairly well. Maybe not. Anyway, I've heard that Alfred is best for finding files, but I don't know about the other categories. How about SuperDuper or CCC? Can they do it all?
Downloading computer into external hard drive
