Migration Questions

[jmkiska]

I have a late 2010 iMac on which I have been running 10.6.8 because of some legacy applications I needed for work. I have also been running Windows 7 Pro via Parallels Desktop. Over the past week I have developed network issues where the iMac can not get a proper IP address to connect to our local area network servers.

I have purchased an external firewire drive on which I have installed 10.9.2. When I start up with 10.9.2, the IP issues appear to be resolved. My questions about migration are:

1) Do I have to migrate all of my applications from my 10.6.8 user folder to my 10.9.2 user folder or can I run the applications from the 10.6.8 Applications folder?

2) What, if any, problems will I encounter if I do not migrate the applications?

In order to keep working I'm still running 10.6.8 without access to our local servers, but I still have internet and email access. I just don't want to start using my applications under 10.9.2 until I know what to expect.

Thanks for any insights.

 

[Weaselboy]

It is going to depend on the app. Some apps when you install you just open a DMG and drag the app to the /Applications folder and that is it. Those apps tend to be pretty much self contained and you can run them from an external drive like this. Thing is, even if that app works, it will be looking to the currently logged on user account and OS for its settings info, and not finding any it will launch with new, default settings.

Other apps like MS Office and Adobe products have installers that put support files in other folders outside /Applications and those are not going to work at all running like you want.

What might be better it to clone the 10.6.8 install to an external and save that to boot to when you need to run those apps. Then after that just install Mavericks over top of the internal disk 10.6.8 install. That should give you a working Mavs install on the Internal with all your apps still there. Then you can just option key boot to the external for the odd apps that won't run under Mavs.

Then if you decide you don't like this setup you can just clone the 10.6.8 from the external back to the erase internal and be back where you are now.

Just a suggestion.