MacBook Migration

My laptop at Sun was a nice little Mac­Book; light­er than the Mac­Book Pro but power­ful enough for my needs. So when I left, I decided I’d buy myself a new Mac­Book, being the path of least res­ist­ance. In the­ory, Apple makes it easy to migrate your inform­a­tion from one Mac­Book to anoth­er. So I stripped the Sun inform­a­tion off the old one, bought my new one, added a couple of gig of RAM, and came home full of anticipation.

The migra­tion was­n’t quite as easy as all that. I installed the Migra­tion Assist­ant on the old laptop, con­nec­ted the new one with an Eth­er­net cable, typed in the num­ber that appears on the new one into the old one, got the mes­sage “Pre­par­ing inform­a­tion…” and waited. 15 or so minutes later, the new one says it’s lost the net­work con­nec­tion and gives me a new num­ber, while the old one pops up the dia­log to type the new num­ber into. I repeated the pro­cess a couple of times, chan­ging vari­ables (con­nect through DHCP rather than dir­ectly) with no suc­cess. So I made an appoint­ment with the Geni­us Bar in the loc­al Apple store and went in there.

The Geni­us bar per­son said that there’s a known issue that’s solved by updat­ing the Migra­tion Assist­ant to the latest ver­sion. She updated the soft­ware, but it did­n’t solve the issue; the same prob­lem crops up. She did offer to move everything by hand by pulling out the old disk but I decided I did­n’t feel like wait­ing that long in the mall. And I remembered that I had a Time Machine backup at home, which should also work to put the inform­a­tion on the disk.

Back at home I backed up to the Time Machine, then star­ted up the install­a­tion pro­ced­ure on the new laptop and chose to install set­tings and files from the Time Machine. Then I waited. Approx­im­ately six hours later (no exag­ger­a­tion; the con­stant mes­sage was “check­ing Time Machine backup”) there was some error say­ing it was­n’t an OS X disk, or some­thing like that. At this stage I gave up and decided to just rsync my user dir­ect­ory includ­ing my applic­a­tions. That worked just fine and was much quick­er (about 15 minutes start to finish).

It turns out that rsync on the Mac is a little con­tro­ver­sial. There’s more in-depth dis­cus­sion in the com­ments to one of Tim’s posts. For my pur­poses, rsync worked well; I did take the ele­ment­ary pre­cau­tion of log­ging out on the tar­get laptop first.