Migration Tool - does it work ?

ZENER

I have to set up a new iMac (Mavericks) later for a friend who's business is Desktop Publishing. She currently uses Snow Leopard with all the updates applied. There is a full Time Machine Backup of the machine.

Among the applications installed are Creative Suite, Quark Express and Microsoft Office along with a lot of fonts etc. There is also a huge amount of emails to contend with.

In order to make the transition as seamless and and as painless as possible I was planning on using Migration Tool which promises to transfer over Accounts, Documents and Applications.

Has anyone any actual experience with this feature ? Is it only Apple applications it transfers, i.e. iPhoto, iTunes etc. or is it all applications regardless of vendor ? Could I expect it to reliably copy over the installation of Quark and CS or am I expecting too much ?

What about passwords and certificates stored in Keychain ? Will they be accessible after the migration on the new machine ?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Ken

Nemeses

Migration assistant migrates... everything..literally.


http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4413

Sometimes though from experience if Migrating MS office from one mac to another, you may need to enter the product key again on the new mac..

whiterebel

Worked fine for me anyway. Didn't use those programmes mind.

Somecrimesitry

One thing to bare in mind is that the gap from SL to Mavericks is fairly huge, some of her apps or versions might not be compatible with Mavericks. For instance she might have Adobe App v4 working fine in SL but Mavericks might require Adobe App v6 or later. Just something you might want to check first, nothing worse than everything going fine but then having to tell the person that most of their old apps need new versions to be bought.

ZENER

Mighty impressed with this !! If it works that is. Started the migration at about 4 and a time of about 4 hours was estimated on the app. Created a Time Machine backup of the new Mac before I started it so I have a path back if it goes pear shaped. Doing the migration from a Time Machine of the old iMac.

The only program I'm worried about is Quark but I'll deal with that when/if it fails.

An incredibly simple process for something which is seriously complex ! A far cry from USMT on Windows and don't even consider Windows Easy Transfer, command line tools to scanstate and loadstate the users settings but no way to transfer across applications. Score 1 for Mac OS I think !

Thanks for the comments chaps !!

Ken

Greentree_uk

My experience is that it works, except for nested mail folders (From windows) It does result in a slower machine than if you set it up from a clean install.