In the process of upgrading my Mac SSD drive (which is a whole story of its own), I've come across many different methods of doing so. At one time, I was keeping "Time Machine" backups regularly which made the whole process quick and easy; I swapped the SSD cards and restored the most recent Time Machine backup from the hard drive I was keeping the backups on. Eventually, I came across another method that I was already familiar with already but didn't think of in this particular scenario. It evolves a command line utility called "dd" ( Wikipedia ) mainly used to copy and convert files. This cloning method works on Macs, Linux, FreeBSD and any unix-based systems. You will have to be familiar with the command line interface (Terminal). Normally the command looks like this: $ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb "sudo" is necessary as we are cloning a system drive. "if" is the input file - it is the original drive we wish to clone.
HomeBrew is a package manager (similar to the linux "apt-get"/"zypper"/"yum" front end package managers that are usually shipped with different distros) with one exception: it was built for Apple MacOS systems as a solution since Apple doesn't offer or ship one with MacOS. Dependencies While HomeBrew is a great solution and offers most features other modern package managers offer and has a rich reposatory, it lacks some useful features that make it difficult to use for the purpose of managing installed packages. One issue that I would like to describe here is the lack automatic removal of dependencies. HomeBrew does not keep logs of installed dependencies the same way that the popular Linux package managers do. Some packages require dependencies to work and while HomeBrew can detect the required dependencies and install them automatically as part of the installation process, it will not remove them automatically while removing packages. This