How do I migrate data on my Macbook Pro to an external hard drive?

The best external drive I know is the Western Digital MyBook 1TB. I wouldn’t boot from the external, too many opportunities for weirdness. Leave System, Library, Applications, and Users on the internal drive. Mirror the structure of your Users folder on the external and put all your heavy content there (music, videos, documents). You can put aliases of the external folders on your internal User folders if you like.

How do I go about doing this? Is there a utility? And which external HD would you recommend?

I got a LaCie 1TB d2 Quadra from Apple’s site a couple of months ago for similar reasons, and have been pleased with it so far.

I put two partitions on it: one 300 GB for Time Machine to back up my MBP with, and the rest as an “Archive” area for large files (music, TV shows, saved installer DMGs, etc).

It’s fairly quiet – not so whisper-quiet that I don’t hear it when Time Machine spins it up hourly at backup time, but it’s never been bothersome, and I can’t hear it over music, even if the music is turned down pretty low.

I wouldn’t recommend making an external drive the boot disk, either, though.. just using as a place to store large files, with symbolic links created as necessary on the main drive.

Why not go to the MAC Store?

I heard they do it for free*

* you might have to purchase a new mac to get this service for free, side effects may include internal bleeding, heart attack, drow…

@xgunther: NMI here. Please be more specific.

Are you wanting to be able to start up from the external drive or do you just want to move your “data” (as you put it) to your external drive, thus making a “backup” (key word there) of your data?