Problem migrating Applications to new MBP

[jshelton]

I have a Time Machine back up of my old system on my external hard drive. My initial plan was to not migrate my network prefs, settings, documents, etc, and just start new. I was going to transfer applications such as MS Word and Excel, my iTunes, and iPhoto over from the external as I needed them. Well, that doesn't work. I had to copy my previous system.

Is there not a way to transfer these applications without copying my entire back up?

Thanks...

 

[aristobrat]

Are you using the Migration Assistant program in the Applications > Utilities folder?

It allows you do a more selective restore. For example, you can tell it to migrate your Applications, but not your network settings/user data. It's not totally granular, though. For example, you can't tell it which Applications to bring over. It's all or nothing.

Remember thought that when it comes to iTunes/iPhoto, you don't really want to copy over those applications ... you want to copy over your user data for those applications.

Worse case, you mount your Time Machine backup and just drag 'n drop the specific data you want.