New MacBook en route. What to transfer from iMac?

AdamA9 said:

Guys.

My late 2009 iMac 21.5" has had better days. It is full of software and data. I'm sure after a good restore to factory it will be fine again. However, I've just purchased a new 13" rMBP and wondering what I should transfer to it?

I don't want to load up the new MBP with crap from my old one, but don't want to reformat before I've taken what I need.

Has anyone any similar experience with this? What sort of things should I be looking to transfer. For info my iMac and MBR both have 1TB and I have a 2TB Time Capsule to keep pictures and music and what not.

Thanks for any advice.

Adam

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I'm not 100% in your situation as I just came from windows to mac, but here's my input.
Think of the apps you use on a regular basis - photo editing, music, productivity - I bet it's less than 15 and make a list of them. Start by installing those and within a day, you'll know what you really need.

Copy over bookmarks, password files, and reference material like resumes, etc - to a folder and use that as an in-transit folder - these are the documents you will import to the new machine.

As far as your images, music, songs, etc., move those to your TC knowing that you can access these files from anywhere in the world.
Everything else can wait and be moved as needed.

Think of this as moving house - we have all this junk we don't need, move them from home to home, and end up having the same pile of unopened boxes.

Do you have an external drive? I would suggest creating a bootable backup using SuperDuper or Carbon Clone Copy, so it will copy all of your files.

When my new rMBP arrived, I restored from a Time Machine backup from my TC. Even though I could pick and choose which folders I wanted to include / exclude, the restore included junk system files and other crap that I didn't want to have.

I decided that I would start from scratch.

I then erased the hard drive and reinstalled Mavericks.

I reinstalled the applications. And using the bootable backup that I created from Carbon Clone Copy, I picked and chose the documents (photos, MS Office files, etc. and also my entire Itunes music library).

I am still in the process of looking at the files from my old machine and am slowly copying the files that I need.