Migration from PC without the PC

[ashleykaryl]

Hello,
My father's 8 year old PC running Windows 7 suddenly packed up today and we ended up buying him a Mac Mini that should be here tomorrow.

The problem I have is that due to the way the computer just died without warning we are unable to do a normal migration and the only access we have to his old data is via the external USB drive that had backups done using Windows own backup system.

Does anybody know how we can import his user data like email, bookmarks and pictures etc onto the new Mac Mini when it arrives? I have access to a Windows laptop if that will make the migration feasible.

Thanks

Ashley

 

[alex0002]

Does anybody know how we can import his user data like email, bookmarks and pictures etc onto the new Mac Mini when it arrives? I have access to a Windows laptop if that will make the migration feasible.

Not sure about e-mail. If the browser used in Windows was Firefox, then under the Firefox profile folder there should be a folder called bookmarkbackups. In that folder there should be a bunch of files with names like:
...
bookmarks-2014-06-21_270.json
bookmarks-2014-06-22_270.json
bookmarks-2014-06-24_270.json

If you install firefox on the Mac or any machine that runs firefox you should be able to import your bookmarks from the most recent JSON file.

If you want to import firefox bookmarks to Safari, then this might be another option:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/export-bookmarks-safari

I'm not sure about other browsers.

Pictures are just pictures, so when you get the new Mac Mini and login as the new user for the first time, there should be a folder called Pictures. You should be able to just copy those saved pictures into the Pictures folder in the Mac and then view them in Preview or iPhoto or whatever.

 

[ashleykaryl]

Thanks for the information and apologies for my late reply. It turned out to be a messy job with lots of strangely missing data in the backups and problems importing emails from Windows Live. The pictures, bookmarks and contacts were easy enough to locate though and I was able to simply drag those across to the Mac.

It's all up and running now so hopefully he will stick with Macs and it will be easier to help him maintain.