time machine question concerning MacBook Air

[pooksie]

hi

to offer some background, I had a MacBook Air before that ran lion but I was careless and dropped it and it crashed on me but the good news is that I had it backed up!

I just bought a new haswell laptop but it's currently running mountain lion. so will time machine turn the new laptop back into lion?

 

[ZBoater]

No, not if you use Migration Assistant.

 

[SteveJobs2.0]

Not to jujack the thread, but on the same note, if you go from a larger Mac to smaller air HDD, how would the migration assistant work? Say the the op's new hard drive is smaller than the one he had before so the migration assistant wouldn't not be able to a direct transfer of all the files.

 

[gr8tfly]

Not to jujack the thread, but on the same note, if you go from a larger Mac to smaller air HDD, how would the migration assistant work? Say the the op's new hard drive is smaller than the one he had before so the migration assistant wouldn't not be able to a direct transfer of all the files.

Migration Assistant doesn't restore an image backup. It's file based, so as long as the total of all the categories it migrates is less than the free space when it started, it should be fine. Even with the "system files" category is checked, it won't migrate old or duplicate OS files. This is mostly to migrate over 3rd party support files.

 

[Weaselboy]

Not to jujack the thread, but on the same note, if you go from a larger Mac to smaller air HDD, how would the migration assistant work? Say the the op's new hard drive is smaller than the one he had before so the migration assistant wouldn't not be able to a direct transfer of all the files.

Just to expand a bit on what gr8tfly said... it is all about the total size of the data and not drive size.

If I understand your concern though, you are asking if say you have 200GB of personal data total and a new machine with a 120GB disk drive? Then you will have a problem. If you check all the options in Migration Assistant, it will calculate the size of the data and the destination and give you a message that you have too much data to fit on the new machine. What you can do to mitigate this is go through the selection list (below) and uncheck enough large categories to get below the new drive size limit. So if you unchecked Music and Photos, you would import everything else, then later move Music and Photos to an external drive perhaps.