In this episode we talk all about setting up a new Mac. Do you want to migrate your data or start from scratch? What are the options for getting your old data on your new Mac? Katie and David explore the options and share their tips and tricks.
Links of note
MacSparky Screencast (Multiple e-mail accounts)
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[...] Mac Power Users 6, about setting up a new Mac is up. [...]
Sure wish I had listened to this before I set up my new MBP 13″ and ended up with this media browser corruption.
Great podcast!
WOW!
Excellent podcast, really good stuff here. I’ll be in the market to replace my 17″ MacBook Pro around the end of the year so revisiting this episode will be a pre-requisite.
Thanks again for a great job,
Robert
Katie, I was having the exact same problem when I upgraded to a 13″ MacBook Pro. Thanks for mentioning the problem and how to fix it. If anyone else is looking for the link to download the iLife Support file it is http://support.apple.com/downloads/iLife_Support_9_0_3.
One of the things I do when setting up computers for others (Mac & Windows) is to setup Dropbox on their machines and then setup a shared account between us. As well as you both getting extra free space for signing up through Dropbox’s referral programme I can then drop any files or updates I need them to have the next time I call round there.
I usually create symbolic links in Dropbox to key folders such as Documents and Pictures. This way their data is being backed up to the cloud without them doing anything special (I’ve tried telling them to save things in folder in Dropbox in the past, but found they’d forget a lot of the time. So they would have some files in the regular Documents folder and others in the Dropbox folder).
I was listening to this episode and you mentioned mounting all the discs so that when you’re making images of an application that has multiple discs you don’t have to wait around to put each disk in the drive. How do you do that? Yes I’m not a power user but a girl can dream!
@Teri
Stay tuned. I’ll explain deeper in a post or screencast.
Thanks for mentioning Grapher.app at the end of this podcast. I had no idea it was in my Applications folder. It is a great, simple equation editor. Pastes right into NeoOffice no problem. Love finding little gems like this that come free with OS X.
One thing that I do different then most is I reformat the new Mac with the supplied installer DVD disc, so I can customize the contents and then I use Migration Assistant to transfer data; but I don’t use it to transfer preferences, I do those manually as needed and to ensure corruption is kept to a minimum. I don’t install the full Printer list, the Languages likewise is pruned too.
Lots of good coverage. I wish someone would put together a worksheet listing the items to have & steps to take when setting up a new mac.
The closest I’ve found is Apple’s worksheet for setting up Snow Leopard Server:
http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/Worksheet_v10.6.pdf
Great episode as usual. Just wanted to mention that I have restored my macbook pro several times from Time Machine backups on an external hard drive using USB. I haven’t tried USB to migrate from one computer to another, but USB does work at least when migrating from a hard drive.