Planning on a manual migration to new computer: advice, please

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I am getting a MacBook Air to replace my 4+ year old MacBook Pro.



Rather than using migration assistant, I think I want to start from fresh and do manual migration. I'm a notorious "tinkerer" and install and uninstall lots of apps and utilities. Consequently, I've accumulated a lot of left-over flotsam and jetsam on my mac. Moreover, given the SDD restrctions with the Air, I want to conserve as much space as possible and not migrate over a bunch of unnecessary files.



Anyway, I am prepared to reinstall all my apps and transver my document.



I think the only potentially dicey thing will be moving my iTunes and Aperture library to the new machine.



This is about the best resource I've found: http://www.cultofmac.com/how-to-perf...on-macrx/45114



In general, can anyone offer advice on how best to do this "manual migration" (or talk me out of it if it's a mistake)?







Thanks.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    It's perfectly ok to do this. Take a note of which apps you have installed (you can takes notes of directories by selecting all and dragging into a textedit plan text file).



    When you copy files over manually, you really just need to change the owner if the account name differs on the new machine. You can do this with a terminal command sudo chown -R "name" <folder>.



    If you plan to get rid of your old machine, just keep a cloned backup of your old system on an external that doesn't have apps, system etc. This covers you if you used unix things you still need like SQL databases or have FTP passwords in a preference file.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    argeliusargelius Posts: 309member
    Thanks -- good advice.
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