My Migration experience from 1 Snow Leopard mac to another

[deetle]

I used the Migration Assistant app that come with OS X.

It looked fairly simple , but it did took a few tries as on the old mac it kept giving me an error, witch I could get by , but on the new mac it would sit their for ever telling me it is calculating, so after ~30 minutes of that , I retried it , but with the same results. So after doing that for about 3 times , on the 4th try it it got passed the calculating part fairly quickly , and started the process. I switched a few times where I started the Migration Assistant app first , but not sure witch one worked at the end.

So the mistake I did was to create the same account name on the new mac as on the old mac. So Migration Assistant did notice that , and prompt me to rename the account from old mac when it moved it to the new mac.

So now it was off doing its work , and it took about 11+ hours over my wireless N network. Both mac has N also . I had about 200 MG of data on my old mac. It took about that time , but it went with out any issues.

So once it was done , the issue was that it failed to apply this account name change to all the security settings to all the migrated file from the old mac. So once the migration was done , and logged into my renamed migrated account , its whole user folder gave me access denied.

Also time machine gave me a popup on the migrated system asking me if I want to use the old back up , or create a new one. Ok , but it never stopped asking me , even so I told it to create a new one every time. I got this popup about 15+ times.

The virtual machine files/packages that VMWare creates ( *. vmwarevm ) some how where only 1.2 gigs in size on the migrated system , where they supposed to be 10+ gig each.

It was funny that Microsoft Office just worked on the migrated system, but for apples Works 08 , I had to dig up the original disk for the serial #.


So it was easy to buy the Mac , but it took me 2 + hours to get migration started , took all night to perform the migrate , and then I spend a better day getting the migration issues resolved , fiddling with it, going back and worth old/new mac , and talking with apple support.

Could be simpler.

Funny part , Apple support told me to use firewire next time , as it is a lot faster. Its a new white macbook I told him , no firewire. He didn't believe me at first. :-)

[scottness]

Originally Posted by deetle

So now it was off doing its work , and it took about 11+ hours over my wireless N network. Both mac has N also . I had about 200 MG of data on my old mac. It took about that time , but it went with out any issues.

You mean 200GB?

Yeah, I wouldn't attempt to do it wirelessly. Ethernet's the way to go if you don't have firewire.