miss in all the hubbub about Wednesday’sPower Mac G5 announcementis that these new Power Mac G5s will be the first to contain an upgraded Setup Assistant diligence that will remove your file and druthers from your old Mac to your fresh one , reducing one of the openhanded hassles that comes with moving to a young Mac .
Of course , back in the twenty-four hours of Mac O 9 you could just climb up one Mac ’s hard drive on the other ’s screen background and copy all the file over . But with OS X ’s directories full of invisible Unix files , things have get a lot more complicated . I ’ve taken to using Carbon Copy Cloner every time I migrate from one Mac to another .
This newfangled feature film of Setup Assistant necessitate that your sure-enough Mac have a FireWire port and be range at least Mac OS X 10.1 . Then , when you charge up your young Mac for the first sentence , you ’ll be ask if you want to copy info over from your previous system .
At the starting time of the process , Setup Assistant apprize you about how to put your older Mac into FireWire Target Mode , by restarting it with the “ T ” key held down . Once the two estimator are connected via FireWire , Setup Assistant scan the the old computer ’s drive and presents a gore with several options about what to move from previous Mac to new .
Among the items you may prefer to move are user story and the correspond user folders ( you may replicate them all over or prefer them on a per - user basis ) , connection configurations , the contents of your Applications brochure ( although it wo n’t bother re-create old versions of pre - installed package if there are newer versions present on the Modern G5 ) , “ Files and Folders ” ( basically anything that ’s on your driving in someplace that ’s not a standard system directory — for example , poppycock that ’s in a brochure you created at the root level of your hard drive ) , and the content of arduous - drive partitions that are n’t the old Mac ’s boot partition . ( My understanding is that the contents of other partitions are simulate to the base level of your new Mac ’s intemperate drive . )
Once you ’ve chosen what you desire to copy , the young Mac begins the process of transfer all the data over via the speedy FireWire connection . Once that transference is done , Setup Assistant preserve the physical process of get your new Mac configure — but now with the cognition of the new account and options that have been transferred over from your older system .
Transferring the data is n’t a manipulation - it - or - lose - it option , either . Since Setup Assistant is an lotion on the new Mac ’s concentrated effort , you could also opt to go it at a later time and add in your older write up , stage setting , and documents when you ’re quick to make the move .
( UpdatedJune 10 , 12:44 pm PT , with information from Apple . Thanks toMacFixItfor the initial tip . MacFixIt ’s clause now also link to a series of concealment shots that show this feature film in activeness . )
