I have a mid 2010 13" MBP that I am wanting to last me a couple more years.
It was suggested I get a SSD to replace my hard drive, so I bought it but need to know some stuff before switching to it.
I have an external hard drive that I back everything up to. After I have backed up everything, what's the best way to go about putting back the Mac OS, iTunes, Microsoft Office, Pictures, Documents, etc. that I want on the SSD? I don't want to put everything back onto the MBP, just things I use most often.
Best Answer
You can "restore" to a new Mac during setup from a Time Machine Backup. This would be the most straight forward solution, but it won't let you selectively pick and choose what to restore.
An option still involving Time Machine would be to exclude locations that you don't want to backup and restore fully (such as the Applications folder) and just backup that folder manually onto some external hard drive.
A clean way would be to just install Mac OS X fresh onto that hard drive and copy everything "by hand". This gives you most control over which files will be copied and which you don't need anymore, but it'll take you much longer.
In regards to how to do it all (install Mac OS X onto your new SSD hard drive), I would consider this:
Currently I assume you have three hard drives. The first one inside your MBP (the internal hard drive). The second one in your external hard drive (1TB Seagate with the Time Machine Backup on it). And the third one is your new SSD (currently not in any case).
OPTION 1 (if you can't tinker with your external hard drive)
OPTION 2 (if you can't partition your external hard drive)
Alternatively, you can also put your original hard drive from the MBP into the external housing in Step 6 and just copy everything manually (and skip Step 7).