Migration Assistant - merge apps and accounts from old Mac to new Mac?

[nudoru]

Sorry, that title should have been move to existing not "new" ...

I have a iMac that I've been using that I'd like to turn in to the kids' computer but I don't want to loose the apps and data that I have on it in the process. They've been using an iMac and have a lot of games and saves.

I've used Migration Assistant lots of times on new Macs, but never on Macs with existing accounts and data that I want to preserve.

I'd like to use Migration Assistant on the iMac and bring over their user accounts and apps. I assume that it'll copy the user accounts and merge any other data (apps) and that my existing account will still work fine.

Any one have experience with this? Does it work the way I assume?

 

[komatsu]

Yes, Migration Assistant works surprisingly well.

In the majority of cases, it does an impressive job of migrating data into specific apps.

However, one surprise might be Office for Mac, this might have to be reactivated - so dig out those activation codes.

 

[cmaier]

Sorry, that title should have been move to existing not "new" ...

I have a iMac that I've been using that I'd like to turn in to the kids' computer but I don't want to loose the apps and data that I have on it in the process. They've been using an iMac and have a lot of games and saves.

I've used Migration Assistant lots of times on new Macs, but never on Macs with existing accounts and data that I want to preserve.

I'd like to use Migration Assistant on the iMac and bring over their user accounts and apps. I assume that it'll copy the user accounts and merge any other data (apps) and that my existing account will still work fine.

Any one have experience with this? Does it work the way I assume?

Yes, it should work fine for that. I’ve migrated accounts from old computers to new ones with existing accounts, and it adds them to the new computer as new accounts without mangling the preexisting ones.

 

[nudoru]

I was mainly concerned about it overwriting apps on the target computer. So I manually installed the apps I needed and used the assistant to move over the kids' accounts. They said it's working so problem solved!