September 16, 2015

Old Files on a New Computer

Filed under: Main — Tags: — admin @ 12:01 am

One of the things I dread about getting a new computer is the inevitable personality transfer. Yes, the new PC is faster and better than your old clunker (which last week was your treasure and joy). The dreadful part is how to get the files and programs you love transferred from the old computer to the new one.

For years, when I got a new PC, I simply started over. That was frustrating.

Most of the time you could pull your files from a fresh backup (which I hope you always have). The problem, however, was copying the programs. Windows Backup doesn’t archive program files, so they must all be re-installed. That’s a pain and, lamentably, an accepted part of the process when getting a new Windows PC.

I was fully expecting to duplicate that process for the new Macintosh I purchased.

After starting my new Macintosh, the first program run is setup and configuration. It immediately asked me if I had another Mac from which I wanted to transfer my stuff. Not only that, it specifically wanted to know if I had a Time Machine backup handy.

I did!

So I chose the old Mac’s Time Machine volume, which sits on a RAID server in my office.

The problem: It was an estimated 8 hours to copy the 300GB worth of data. Eight hours!

Immediately after the process started, the notion dawned in my head: “I probably should have started this operation right before I went to bed.” Yeah, that would have been a good idea. As it was, I started setting up the new iMac in the afternoon, so I could use the old iMac for the rest of the day. And the problem there was that whatever I worked on would not get copied to the new machine, so I just didn’t work.

The next day, I completed the setup process. To my surprise, the new Mac was a perfect duplicate of the old one. I mean perfect. All my files were transferred and all the programs as well. The desktop was identical, with the windows and icons all in the same spot. Nothing had changed; it was a complete and perfect personality transfer from the old machine.

I was floored.

Never in my computer history has a new computer been so perfectly cloned from the old one.

The update wasn’t without its glitches. I had to re-install and update those programs that were waiting for the new OS X to be available. I had to endure some software updates and change some configurations. The initial backup process for the new Mac took another 8 hours, but it also retained the backup files from the old Mac.

Yes, I’m impressed. And the system is fast, too. Yee-haw!

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