As part of my back up process I tend to clone my laptop’s internal hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (https://bombich.com https://bombich.com/) or SuperDuper (SuperDuper! http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) to an external drive every few weeks. In the unfortunate event that the Mac dies on me I can then boot another Mac from the cloned drive and carry on working as normal.
The added benefit is that I’ve cloned my way through three MacBook Pros this way and have brought the setup and applications with me each time. Having said that the Macs are almost identical (all MacBook Pros) so you may have issues if you try and cross over to an iMac from a MacBook for example. Once you are up and running on the new Mac you can then upgrade the OS on either the internal or external HD and check that the software runs as expected.
Regards,
Tim.
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