I'm heading to apple, and I'm going to bring my macbook, and I wanted to know if they could transfer my itunes library, photos, etc? Or is that something I would need to do on my own?
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Would the genius bar be able to transfer my stuff to a new comp?
- Thread starter Pinkstiletto66
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Yes, they can do it, but you can, too.
How to use Migration Assistant to transfer files from another Mac
How to use Migration Assistant to transfer files from another Mac
If you can use firewire to transfer, you should be able to put the source computer in the "Target Mode" (hold the "T" key while booting) with no need to see anything on the screen. You do the rest from your new computer, which will hopefully have a good screen. 
I depends on which computers you are using/buying to have a firewire port on them.
-howard
I depends on which computers you are using/buying to have a firewire port on them.
-howard
If you can use firewire to transfer, you should be able to put the source computer in the "Target Mode" (hold the "T" key while booting) with no need to see anything on the screen. You do the rest from your new computer, which will hopefully have a good screen.
I depends on which computers you are using/buying to have a firewire port on them.
-howard
I'm leaning 80 percent 11 inch air. But they should be able to do it for me.
Sure you can do it yourself but if you are already buying a new computer ... why not take advantage of some help.
On your new machine think about what kind of backup strategy you will be using. You cannot always depend on being able to get stuff off your current machine in other words ...
Yea, my friend told me to get an external hard drive. On apple its 1000, and I'm like NO WAY. I will need to shop around. I'm new to all of this in a way. I've been a basic person. I use my comp, listen to my music, check my mail, make some movies, thats it. Everything else like computer jargon is soooo new to me. I even came up with the idea to just get my screen working on my old mac, and still keep it to rip dvds if I have to instead of buying a dvd drive. So many ideas I get from reading other threads. If I can recall I only have about 2/3 gbs of music, and that has been over the course of 4 years, and about 1-2 gbs of photos. So, I wonder if I can store all that on a usb.
I don't know which drive you're talking about, but there are hundreds of drives you can buy for MUCH less than that, such as the ones below. It's a good idea to have an external drive for regular backups of all your data.
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™
OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro
Thanks. When you go to "buy now" when chosing the air, when you scroll down one of the extra buying options is an external hard drive for 999, and up.
That's not a regular hard drive. That's a Thunderbolt RAID system. You don't need Thunderbolt or RAID for your purposes. A USB or Firewire connection to a single hard drive is fine. Also, you'll typically find better prices on 3rd party products by buying them from vendors other than Apple.
Oooo. Ok, thanks. Amazon.com and I are best friends, and I think that's what is going to happen. Lol.
You could buy a bare "USB External Drive Enclosure" from OWC or one of many others, then remove the drive from your broken Macbook and put it in the enclosure. When you get your new computer, the startup routine can migrate your applications and data from the external drive plugged into a USB port.
When you are comfortably up and running with your new computer, completely erase the external drive and use it for a backup Time Machine drive.
This would only cost you $30 total and you would have a backup drive when you are done:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MOTGSU3/
You can probably sell your old computer on eBay for parts, and not including the drive probably won't impact the price you get for it since most buyers are looking for a good logic board and probably don't want a used disk drive for a newly rebuilt computer.
-howard
When you are comfortably up and running with your new computer, completely erase the external drive and use it for a backup Time Machine drive.
This would only cost you $30 total and you would have a backup drive when you are done:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MOTGSU3/
You can probably sell your old computer on eBay for parts, and not including the drive probably won't impact the price you get for it since most buyers are looking for a good logic board and probably don't want a used disk drive for a newly rebuilt computer.
-howard
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i'm sorry to hijack this post, but since it's about the same topic...
any idea if the genius bar would be able to transfer my stuff to a new comp that i DIDN'T buy at the apple store, say I bought it from Amazon instead?
any idea if the genius bar would be able to transfer my stuff to a new comp that i DIDN'T buy at the apple store, say I bought it from Amazon instead?
If you get a new laptop and it comes with Lion, a USB drive will be painfully slow, depending on if your doing a full backup or not. The minimum external drive to purchase would be a firewire drive.
The OP indicated they probably were going to get the 11" Air which doesn't have a firewire port on it.
I have never found a USB drive to be slow under Lion. I do reformat them for OS X, as most come with a "universal Fat32" format similar to EXFat (which Disk Utility can also format) for Windows and Mac compatibility.
The USB drive backup is certainly faster than a firewire backup to a Time Capsule or something similar. The first Time Machine backup is going to be slow no matter how you do it if you have a large and full disk and have a eSata backup port. However, subsequent incremental backups are pretty short.
