iMac to Macbook hard drive switch, URGENT.

E

etchagoetsch922

Registered
Hello,
I currently have a 27in iMac that is going to be sold on ebay and i plan on purchasing a macbook. Could you tell me how to take the entire contents of my hard drive (itunes, documents, photos, movies) and put it on an external hard drive? Then, when my new macbook comes in the mail how to put it all back onto the new macbook. I am running the Lion OS and i was also curious if i could transfer the Microsoft Office suit i put on my iMac on to my macbook too. Help!

Thanks so much,
Eric M Goetsch
 
1) Get an external hard drive.

2) Turn on Time Machine on your iMac.

3) Let Time Machine back up your entire drive (overnight, probably).

4) Acquire new computer.

5) Select option to "restore from a Time Machine backup" when you first boot the new computer.

6) Drink beers.

This process will not only restore all your documents (music, movies, Word documents, etc.), but it will also restore all currently-installed applications on your computer as well, so Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and any other applications you have installed will be restored as well.
 
Ypour best bet would not do a full restore since the MacBook will have extra things in it for a laptop the iMac didn't. So just import the applications/picture/music, videos you want.

Just don't transfer the network settings. IMHO when people import network setting from one kind of Mac to another it creates all kinds of networking headaches.
 
If you're running Lion (and maybe even Snow Leopard) on the new machine, the "Restore from Time Machine" will take care of all that for you. It will provide a fresh installation of Lion and import only what is relevant to the new machine.

The situation you describe Satcomer is if you did a Carbon Copy Cloner (or other cloning operation) and did a direct disk-to-disk clone. In that scenario, yes, certain laptop- or desktop-specific things would carry over to the new machine. With a Time Machine "restore" operation, though, this does not happen.
 
Just a quick note, Eric, make sure your external hard drive is big enough to back up your entire drive. You can exclude particular folders with Time Machine but in my experience, it's just easier to back up the whole thing and let Apple do its thing.

It does suck, however, to get 3/4 of the way through and have it throw an error because it ran out of space.
 
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