Setting up new Macbook

You can use TimeMachine when you set up your machine fort the first time, but I recommand :

- start your rMB normally
- Cleaninstall OS X
- use iCloud to recover some contents
- use Apple ID on the mac app store , iTunes etc to recover some contents
- Copy / Paste from HDD other app and contents

The only problem : System prefs, you have to set up again , remember ur settings or use notes.

That's ok if you dont really have a lot of apps and contents. And IMO it's really a proper way to set up a new machine.

 

I also set mine up "from scratch" but I was coming from a MBA (not my main machine) without much customization and most of my data is in Dropbox.

You should have no problem restoring the TimeCapsule backup at install. It will ask you if you want to do a fresh install or to restore from a previous backup.

 

Of course you can use the time machine backup but it will be much quicker if you can migrate from an external drive (this of course requires an external drive and a usb->usb-c adaptor).

My method;
- Use Carbon Copy Cloner (or equivalent) to back up current machine to external drive
- Fire up new machine.
- Can't remember the exact order, but if it asks you to create a user account before you get to it asking if you want to migrate from a previous system then create a user that has a different name than the one on the old machine.
- Use Migration assistant to transfer everything from the external drive
- When it's done fire up the machine in your migrated account, and delete the temporary account.
- Permission are sometimes a bit messy after a migration so it's worth using disk utility to repair permissions.

An potentially simpler alternative method would be to boot the old machine in target disk mode and transfer from that if you have the correct cable. See here; http://www.macworld.com/article/291...-the-right-cable-which-apple-doesnt-sell.html

 

I restored my rMB from a TC/TM backup and once completed it worked great. I have a lot of software and configs and data its a pain to do from scratch so I did the recovery rather than a clean install. I just made sure my old machine (and this its backup) was clean and working efficiently before its last backup.

But there is a bug in OSX 10.10.2 that can cause your machine to hang for an indeterminate time (maybe 20 minutes or forever until you force a reboot, or you may have no issue at all) when you configure WiFi and restore on boot. There are a lot of complaints about this so I assume its common.

There are a number of possible solutions. I had planned to use a Digital AV adapter to charge and restore from a USB SSD (didn't work out cause the rMB freaked out the SSD and then wouldn't recognize it). Plugged in a USB ethernet adapter into the Digital AV adapter and restored successfully (but took 2 tries and like 6+ hours even wired). You could also not configure Wifi on boot, setup a dummy account (just one thats not your normal account name) and finish the boot. Then config WiFi and use recovery assistant to restore your real stuff from the TC/TM backup over wifi. Then delete the "dummy" account you created on boot and your machine will be configured just like your old machine (may have some usual minor things to do with software keys, some passwords, sometimes printers etc)

I found setting up the rMB the worst experience of setting up any MAC I've ever done due to the combination of buggy software and bleeding edge USB-C. But once that was over, I really love the rMB.

Good luck on your setup!

 

I set mine up clean, redownloaded what I could from the app store and just made a list of the contents of my applications folder on my old machine and made sure I reinstalled everything on the list that I wanted that came from places other than the app store. All docs / pics / music were already on the cloud so I found it very easy to get everything set up and I ended up with a clean machine without any cruft from my old one.

 

Mine was on 10.10.3 out the box fresh setup, 350Gb plus of data and apps, no issues at all. Once I had the apps installed, just left the rMB to sync with my Cloud server, mirroring all data on my other rMac`s. For me the process of setting up the rMB was seamless...

Q-6

 

I would never restore from a backup across different devices or across major revisions of the OS. There is always weirdness.