What files should be saved from an old Mac?

[Spotlighter9]

Hi All,

I have an old MacBook Pro (Late 2008) running El Capitan (MacOS 10.11.6) that I am "decommissioning." I have scoured through the obvious places on the hard drive (Users, Library...downloads, documents, etc) looking for personal files and documents that were created/collected over the years. I want to make sure I retain anything important and move them over to an external backup drive in organized folders so they are readily accessible. Any suggestions on where else I should look?

Also, I use DaisyDisk, but it's hard to know whether anything relevant is in folders like "private", "containers", "system", "hidden space", "application support", "caches", "logs", etc.

I'm not concerned about media content (photos, music, mail, messages) as these are in iCloud and the MBP is fully backed up on Time Machine.

Thanks!

 

[NoBoMac]

I think you are good to go, as the places you listed are the places that user files usually wind up. Library might have backups of files (eg. Quicken creates backups in there; Office might have some crash copies of documents) but those are not generally primary files.

And since you have a Time Machine backup, anything elsewhere should be extractable from it.