Replacing MacBook's SSD with a new one - how to clone?
Solution 1:
If you can't connect the old and new drives to the Mac at the same time, follow this procedure:
-
Create a clone copy from the old drive onto the intermediary external USB drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!.
-
Then swap the hardware over.
-
You will need to boot to the intermediary drive (or a fourth drive!), so that you are free to write all over the new internal. (So make sure you've installed an OS on the disk beforehand...!)
-
Use one of the apps mentioned above (the same one!) to copy the clone back to the blank new drive.
Generally, I would always advise having a spare drive with a bootable OS on it, 'just in case' - even if it's just a little 64 GB flash drive or something. (Oh, and of course, you'll also have another drive for your backup...!)
Solution 2:
I would highly recommend doing this task entirely on the Mac.
Mac>Mac cloning is simple. Persuading Windows to do it is… not. You can buy utilities so that Windows can read/write HFS+ or APFS, but persuading it to handle the multi-volume setup you will need, including a working recovery partition, is not a task I would trust to it.
See Carbon Copy Cloner for one app that is good at this task.