[pbjudge]

I just got a new 15" PB and I want to transfer my stuff over from my iBook. In particular, I'd like to have all my keychains, preferences, and doc's go over. Also, I want to move my iPhoto and iTunes' libraries.

I have seen threads that suggested using Carbon Copy Cloner or Backup2.

Could anyone who has done this before give me advice and even step by step instructions?

I don't wanna screw this up. Help!!!

[Simon]

Originally posted by pbjudge:
I just got a new 15" PB and I want to transfer my stuff over from my iBook. In particular, I'd like to have all my keychains, preferences, and doc's go over. Also, I want to move my iPhoto and iTunes' libraries.

To transfer user stuff from on machine to another is very simple.

1. Connect the machines. Either in TargetDisk mode over FireWire or with Ethernet.

2. On the new machine create the user with the same name as on your old computer, i.e. if you had an account "joe" on your old machine, then call the main account on the new machine "joe" too.

3. On the new machine take the terminal and copy over the whole user space of the old Mac to the new one with a resource-preserving copy command like ditto. An example for user "joe" would be:

% sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/oldMac/Users/joe/* /Users/joe/

Your password will be requested. Enter it and be patient for eveything to be copied. This will copy all your documents, music, photos, movies, etc. including all your preferences and settings.

4. Make sure that the ownership preferences are all set correctly:

% sudo chown -R joe:staff /Users/joe

Again, you will be prompted for your password. Enter it.

5. Restart the Mac and login to the account "joe" and everything should be the way it was.

That should do the trick. I hope I didn't mis-type anything here. Feel free to ask if you need further help.

Good luck!

[kman42]

If you are afraid of the terminal, you can do it manually, which really only requires a bit more effort:

1) Connect as described in previous post
2) Setup up identical accts as described
3) Copy over all of the folders within your Home folder to your new Home folder, except Library. Choose to replace all.
4) Wait
5) Copy over the contents of your library folder a few folders at a time. There are some folders within the Library folder (Keychains) which won't copy, but let you copy the contents manually.

kman

[pbjudge]

Thanks Simon and kman! So I take it that neither of you recommend CCC (carbon copy cloner)?

If that is the case, I think I will try to use terminal, to do it. I will post back in a couple of days and let you know how it goes. (I need to build up my nerve first...LOL!)

Thanks again to both of you.

- PJ

[MindFad]

Good info. Quick questions since we're talking about transferring stuff. When I get Panther�who knows when that'll be�I was thinking of backing up all of my applications and home folder to my FW drive, wiping my main drive, putting Panther on it, and then transferring all of my apps and home folder back over. Will that be cool? I imagine I'll have to redo all of the apps' preferences and stuff again, but that's fine.

Also, is all of my e-mail preserved in my home folder somewhere? Or how can I transfer that over to Panther mail? I really don't want to just install Panther on top of 10.2.8. Options? What's archive install again? Hehe. Intuition failure....

Thanks for any info!

[Hop Pocket]

Originally posted by MindFad:
Good info. Quick questions since we're talking about transferring stuff. When I get Panther�who knows when that'll be�I was thinking of backing up all of my applications and home folder to my FW drive, wiping my main drive, putting Panther on it, and then transferring all of my apps and home folder back over. Will that be cool? I imagine I'll have to redo all of the apps' preferences and stuff again, but that's fine.

Also, is all of my e-mail preserved in my home folder somewhere? Or how can I transfer that over to Panther mail? I really don't want to just install Panther on top of 10.2.8. Options? What's archive install again? Hehe. Intuition failure....

Thanks for any info!

I believe that you can import mail with Panther's Mail.app using their wizard. When asked to find the old Mail.app to import from, select the copy on your FW drive. That should import everything over. I have had success doing that on a 10.2.6 -> 10.2.6 installation, and am assuming that Apple would include that functionality going from 10.3 <-> 10.2.x.

I am just about out of room on my Users partition, but luckily I have a separate hard drive. I was planning on using 'ditto' to copy everything to that hard drive, and like you, wiping and then installing Panther. I probably will manually reinstall all of my apps that used an installer initially, and will just copy over the more lightweight apps.

I am thanking myself that I save all of my disk images and installers

[Simon]

Originally posted by pbjudge:
Thanks Simon and kman! So I take it that neither of you recommend CCC (carbon copy cloner)?

I do highly recommend CCC. It is a great program because it's simple, reliable and fast. It's great.

But, in your case I don't exactly see why you would need it. You are going from an old Mac to a new one. Your old Mac already acts as a backup for your new machine during transfer, since it carries a copy of all the information.

CCC is a backup tool. When I do a clean OS install on a Mac with an external FireWire disk I use CCC. But when I go from one Mac to the other I don't necessarily need a second backup.

But, if you feel better about it, you can certainly use CCC to backup your old Mac first. It won't hurt, that's for sure. Backups are a good thing and are never wrong.

Good luck.

[Simon]

Originally posted by MindFad:
Good info. Quick questions since we're talking about transferring stuff. When I get Panther�who knows when that'll be�I was thinking of backing up all of my applications and home folder to my FW drive, wiping my main drive, putting Panther on it, and then transferring all of my apps and home folder back over. Will that be cool?

Yes. That will be very cool.

It is an absolutely good thing to do. I plan on doing the same. You can go from an old system to a new one in a very short amount of time and nevertheless you get a fresh an clean install. It's actually much easier thn with OS 9 where you manually had to go through prefs and decide if you want to keep or trash them.

Do yourself a favor and use CCC to copy your stuff from your Jaguar volume to the external disk. It will make sure you have a 100% complete backup including invisible files and it will preserve proper permissions. It is very easy to use. Best of all, if you use CCC and something goes terribly wrong, you can boot from your external FW drive since CCC backs up everything, so you still have a partition capable of booting at all times!

I imagine I'll have to redo all of the apps' preferences and stuff again, but that's fine.

It depends on how you do it. If you just copy back your apps and documents you will have to set new prefs for all apps.

If you copy back your stuff the way I described above in my original reply to pbjudge with CCC and Terminal.app your prefs are not lost and you should find everything the way it was.

There however some concerns about this. And I haven't been able to get reliable info concerning these questions when copying back the entire /User/username/Library folder:

- Are all system-specific prefs stored elsewhere (i.e. /Library or /System/Library) so that Jaguar-specific prefs won't overwrite new Panther-specific prefs?

- If /User/username/Library is copied back, but the name of the Mac or the name of the root volume changes (as is often the case when you go from an old to a new Mac), can this cause problems with pref files that get copied? Or do prefs generally use relative paths and generic names like "localhost"?

- When I set up a new System and I create a new user space "joe" the folder /User/joe/Library already contains some files. If I copy back my old Library contents from the backup of my old system I will overwrite these new pref files. Can I be sure that I won't overwrite critical stuff?

It would be quite nice if somebody had reliable info to answer these questions.

There is however also a quite different approach: Copy back apps, user documents, music files, etc. but don't copy back prefs, i.e. do not copy back /User/username/Library from your old system's backup. Instead set all prefs again manually. The reason people give this advice is that they claim that with time your pref folder fills up with old junk and corrupted files. They claim that if you go to a new system with a fresh install, you might as well also update all prefs. This is certainly true and I agree. The only problem is that there can be hundreds of pref files belonging to dozens and dozens of apps and it can be a terribly large amount of work to do all the prefs again. On top of all, it's really boring work. It sucks to re-do all these settings by hand.

Also, is all of my e-mail preserved in my home folder somewhere? Or how can I transfer that over to Panther mail? I really don't want to just install Panther on top of 10.2.8. Options?

You don't have to install Panther over Jaguar. I think it's better to do a clean install when you do such an important system update.

Yes, Mail.app normally saves mail in a folder located at /Users/username/Library/Mail/. If you copy back the entire /Users/username/Library folder (like I described in my original reply to pbjudge) you will retain all your e-mail and settings. If not, you will have to get it back by using Mail.app's import-help as Hop Pocket described above. You will have to set the Mail.app prefs again by hand.

[Sorry for the long post. The topic is really important however.]

[MindFad]

Awesome, Simon. Big post, but worth it. Many thanks! I think I'll just preserve my mail manually, and do all my prefs over again, which is no biggy, and avoid any possible corruption or funkiness.

[Polopo43]

"then call the main account on the new machine "joe" too."

Say I would like to sell my computer and change the name of the main user ?
How to do ?
1) create a new user
2) delete the old one ?

Thx for your help

[Simon]

Originally posted by MindFad:
Awesome, Simon. Big post, but worth it. Many thanks!

No problem. For me this is a major topic since I prefer doing clean and fresh installs than updating systems over and over again.

I think I'll just preserve my mail manually, and do all my prefs over again, which is no biggy, and avoid any possible corruption or funkiness.

I'm tending to that as well for myself when I go from Jaguar to Panther.

[Simon]

Polopo43, you're from Switzerland! Gruezi wohl.

Originally posted by Polopo43:
Say I would like to sell my computer and change the name of the main user ?
How to do ?
1) create a new user

Check the Accounts preference panel. It should let you create a new user account with a couple of clicks.

2) delete the old one ?

Also in this preference panel you should be able to delete the user account. If I remember correctly it will delete the account record, but it will not permanently trash the files of that acount. Go to /Users and you should see something like joe_old/ which is the old user directory of user "joe". If you want, you can delete the folder permanently in the Finder or in the Terminal.

Of course if you sell your Mac you could just boot it from the OS X install CD, initialize the disk with DiskUtility and install a fresh and clean OS X. That way the new owner gets a clean new system and you don't have to be worried about your old files being exposed to the new user.

[pbjudge]

Thanks to Simon, et al. I was able to transfer my home folder to my new PB15 with very few problems.

I appreciate all the advice and tips!

Thanks again!

[Simon]

Originally posted by pbjudge:
Thanks to Simon, et al. I was able to transfer my home folder to my new PB15 with very few problems.

I appreciate all the advice and tips!

Thanks again!

You're very welcome.

I'm glad I could help because I've invested lots of time in this topic and I think there are still plenty of questions to be answered.

I'm pretty sure that this is a topic most users will have to deal with some time or another. I will try to point to this thread when people ask and if additinal advice comes up I hope we can add it here too.