“Like a lot of sysadmins, I had a series of scripts and procedures that I used to set up a new machine for a user. They did the job, and well, so I had pooh-poohed the Migration Assistant until this week when I was doing a group of machine upgrades and decided to give it a try. I had already run all the current updates on the boxes, (Quad G5s for our designers), and joined them to our Open Directory domain,” John Welch writes for Datamation.
“I was so very, very wrong about Migration Assistant. It’s far better than any script I could have come up with. You take the old Mac, put it into Target Disk Mode, hook a Firewire cable between them and run Migration Assistant. It lets you pick which users you want to move over. That’s fantastic for pruning old local accounts. It also moves over all applications, user data and even user account records that aren’t already on the new machines. It all just works,” Welch writes. “The biggest thing you have to watch for is if you have multiple system drives. Migration Assistant is only going to use the first disk on the main ATA bus that it finds. If you’re booting from the second disk, it won’t find it. But that’s it, and that’s easily worked around …it was absolutely problem free. I started it when the designers went home, and by the next morning, it was finished, and they were ready to go. The Apple folks did a good job working on this one.”
Full article here.
Find out more about Apple Mac OS X’s Migration Assistant here.
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It is a great application!
I just used it to clone my system onto another machine so I could send mine off for service.
If you are able to transfer to an identical piece of hardware, it is like your own machine was away being repaired. The CLONE is an exact DUPLICATE of your own computer.
Without this great tool, such a thing would be very difficult to accomplish
Make that… NEVER AWAY!
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Yeah, I love this feature. It’s always been extremely helpful.
Tom
http://Www.Acupo.Com
I really like Migration Assistant, it assists me when I want to Migrate things.
Should all apps do exactly what they say?
yeah I am glad you to find it. I have used that since migration option was available on mac os x 10.3 panther. so to me, it’s not new feature, and I’m not surprised.
Just a small note:
For migration Assistant to work, the old computer must be using OS X (any version). It doesn’t work with non-Mac systems or OS 9.
When you start up a new Mac, the Migration Assistant is one of the first things it launches so you don’t have to type in all of your old account and network info. So, when you buy a new Mac, be sure to buy a Firewire cable, too. It will make your setup a breeze!
Can you use it to migrate from an older iMac that has no FireWire? I recently bought my daughter a new iMac to replace her old G3 version. It has no FireWire, which this article references. I’ve never used this app and am unfamiliar with it.
If anyone knows, please clue me in. Thanks.
I’m very sorry, Spark, but I failed to mention that you must have OS X and a Firewire port on the old Mac for it to work.
Was there ever a Mac model that could run OS X and didn’t come with a Firewire port on it? I can’t think of any.
Spark, are you sure that there is no Firewire port?
It’s great but sometimes you get those odd machines that won’t be seen in target mode. I had 5 machines to transfer and 2 I couldn’t due to this issue.
Mike, Tray-loading iMacs had no FireWire port but run OS X just fine. We have 2 of them in daily use here.
Microsoft would have called it something like Windows Digital Asset Displacement Protocol Orifice Nebula Wizard
(Nebula because they sometimes try and throw in an artsy fartsy word to be ‘cool’ like Apple)
I work for a small graphics company and do most of the designing. For whatever reason the boss seems to think I’m the techie around here.So, get stuck pounding my head against the wall with the networking and such. A few months a go we replaced four of our Macs and used this function on all of them. It worked seemlessly. My boss was shocked how all th setting were intact. He figured we’d have some downtime for configurations. It just works and well(MW).
I used the Migration Assistant and it corrupted the preference files for Networking, .Mac, Keychain, Mail and a whole list of other items. It also failed to migrate the files that hold registration keys for most 3rd party apps. After a number of calls to Apple, I ended up dumping the whole setup and doing a clean install of the OS, apps and files.
For the most simple setups it may work, but i will not trust it again. I had to spend way too much time getting my new Mac set up correctly.
If the internal drive has been replaced and the new drive was set different from the original ATA setting, then Target mode will not work. Ran into 2 G4s that had this issue.
Otherwise excellent program. Just got to be aware of multiple drives and whatnot.
The only downside that I have seen is that when you have a system with corrupted user .plist files, the corruption will follow to the new host, as well. This can result in “Application has unexpectedly quit” issues.
I replaced a user’s machine with a new one, thinking it was memory issues. The crashing apps remained. Once I created a new account from scratch, that user has been humming along with no crashes for over a year.
While I think Migration Assistant is a nice app, like a tar stream, it will only I/O what you have. If what you have is bad, it gets propagated.
Ithink Apple needs an XML cleaner to repair these userspace corruption issues.
Mike,
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My Graphite 366 clamshell iBook has no FW port yet runs Panther just fine
Get one of these dual/triple interface external drives for your non-Firewire Mac and clone your internal drive to the external drive.
Then connect the external drive by its Firewire. Migration Assistant will migrate the accounts.
Even though John Welch is an Apple system admin. he didn’t trust Apple. Now you know why these IT guys are the problem. They think they know it all. At least he’s a believer now.
“I work for a small graphics company and do most of the designing. For whatever reason the boss seems to think I’m the techie around here”
OMG yeah been there. Just because you are an Apple fan and know maybe a little more than the aaverage guy you get stuck doing all teh troubleshooting.
I’d tell him to either pay you more money or hire a tech guy.
Spark,
If you don’t have FireWire but the Mac is running OS X, you can remove the hard drive, put it in a firewire enclosure and run Migration Assistant from that. I’ve done it for at least one of my client’s systems.
macromancer
<i>”I’d tell him to either pay you more money or hire a tech guy.”</a>
I should make him pay me more.
We have this massive network hub that all the suites in our building. We switched to a higher DSL connection and had to reroute the wires in the hub. I tried figuring it out first and got frustrated. So we called the phone company in, then the local mac/pc computer techie, then the ISP. They all screwed it up. Somehow one of them switched it over to the alarm system. And the alarm in the end suite kep going off.
In the end I fixed the damn thing and got it running.
I have also used Migration Assistant with success. However, when I migrated from my PowerBook G4 167GHz 15″ to my PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5GHz, the Final Cut Pro Studio HD transferred, but the resulting applications would not launch. I presumed that this was Apple’s attempt to limit piracy, but was still frustrated that I needed to re-install the software. IMO it would have been preferable had Migration Assistant simply refused to transfer the Pro Apps.
I haven’t seen this posted anywhere else, so perhaps my experience was a fluke.
A quick google search reveals the following Apple technote, which documents the problem for earlier versions of FCP Studio, but I have the latest versions (FCP 5.0, Motion 2, etc…) which are supposed to work. It was an upgrade, though (I’ve upgraded every version since FCP 1.25) so maybe that explains it?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302667
Mike only the very old G3 original iMacs and the several color model iMacs didn’t come with firewire. After that they started including firewire on just about everything. Also maybe some of the very first iBooks. But all of that is so old it really doesn’t matter much today.
Migration assistant does what it says it does and really a great tool.