I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com

Mac Migration
Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in Apple, TechBiz at 1:19 pm on Saturday, 5 April 2008

Migrating between Mac’s was quite easy, even though the Migration Assistant didn’t work. In some ways it is better to do it manually as you can start again.  My disk usage is much less that before.

OSX is quite clean in regards to where users files are so the process is straight forward and fastest with a USB disk. The general steps are  …

  1. Under your user folder the main things you want to copy are your documents, iTunes Library and iPhoto Library. Locate these.
  2. Your local Entourage Cache will be under \Documents\Microsoft User Data  and is probably huge. As its on Exchange you don’t need to bring that across.
  3. Copy these up to a USB drive
  4. Set yourself up on your new machine
  5. Run the software update to get all the latest stuff
  6. Install Safari 3.1
  7. Install Office 2008 and set up Entourage.  Your Exchange will then start syncing across the network
  8. Copy back your documents, iTunes and iPhoto Library
  9. Install your other applications
  10. To clean up your old machine, put the Leopard Disk in the drive and reboot holding ‘C’. This will boot from the DVD and allows you to do a clean install and reformat your old hard drive. 

Of course the trick to getting a new computer is to understand your office hierarchy and the needs of each person down the line. There is normally a flurry of excitement when a new person joins the company though it may generate a chain of activity as demonstrated in the following diagram …

The positioning has begun already for who gets a slightly used generation one MacBook Air in a few months :)

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Comments(3)

    Comment by Joe at 4:28 pm on 5 April 2008

    …so you’re self-actualised?




    Comment by scrat at 5:10 pm on 5 April 2008

    spot on ;)




    Comment by Alex at 12:00 am on 6 April 2008

    If you use the same username and password in initial setup - dragging other important stuff from /Library (both of them) is easy too. The uname/pwd combo is essential for using your old keychain seemlessly on the new mac…

    Another mac-transition story. About 2 weeks ago, I spilled about 8oz of coffee into my Macbook. Fortunately, the HD was escaped unscathed. I was able to take it out, put it in a sled, and by telling my substitute machines (a desktop and temp. laptop) to boot from the sled drive as the startup disk - I was back in my same old environment immediately. Pretty resilient stuff that.