Migration Assistance Apps?

[wfriedwald]

What are the best options for "migrating" to a new startup drive?

i was thinking I could move the applications one at a time --- of course, there's a lot of work to dig up the license numbers and re-enter them etc.

But it's probably beyond me to figure out how to manually migrate all the "accounts," my specific CONTACTS, MAIL etc -

I guess that would be the first thing... to get that stuff going.

Probably the Apple Migration assistant, right? Unless there's something I should possibly know up front?

thanks!

w

 

[hfg]

If you are happy with your existing startup drive content ... simply clone that disk to your new startup disk using something like CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) which will prep the boot and recovery sectors and copy everything over to the new drive. You should not have to reactivate any OS X program with license info.

I have CCC programed to also do a once daily backup to an external disk drive so I will have an alternate boot disk and a full backup should something happen to my primary bootable disk.

Otherwise ... yes you can do a fresh install to the new startup disk, then use the built-in Migration Assistant to copy everything from your old startup drive to the new one. Again, you shouldn't have to reactivate anything in a normal OS X installation.

It is always a good idea to have a full backup on a separate drive of your system and data.

 

[lclev]

I recently installed a new SSD as my main drive on my Mac Pro. I did a fresh install of Sierra and set it as the startup drive. I then started migration assistant and pointed it at my original startup drive. It worked great. It moved all my apps and data to the new drive. I did have to input my MS Office product key.

I have also used Carbon Copy Cloner to create a new startup drive too. It really depends on if you want to do a fresh install of OS X or just move to a new drive.

Lisa

 

[PaulB-UK]

You can restore *everything* from Time Machine at the beginning of a fresh install. You end up with a machine identical to how it was before. It even works across machines eg iMac to Mac Pro.

Paul B.

 

[Synchro3]

CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.

 

[RootBeerMan]

I'm with PaulB. I used Time Machine to migrate all my content to a new iMac a couple of months ago. Went flawlessly and it's built in. Migration Assistant was no use, but TM worked like a charm.