CCC Forum

Hallo all I hope you are all keeping well, I need a little advice my Mac is now 11 years old and slowing down rapidly so I think it's time to renew
which is fine (know roughly what I want) but my query is how do I transfer all my programmes and stuff from the old Mac to the new Mac,
is it easy to do? I'm not very techie minded and wondered if the shop would do it for me for a charge.

Any advice would be appreciated

Bett

Apple provides a Migration system to allow transfer of programmes and files between old and new. I recently had the same problem. My 2011 iMac was showing signs of ageing and slowing down and macOS was no longer upgradeable. In June I bought a new iMac and, using Migration, moved a lot of files and data to the new machine. You will need to connect the two machines via USB but you will be guided through the process (which can take a long time!). (Paying for the iMac is an entirely different story!!)

At the same time I updated my TimeMachine backup. I bought a couple of laCie 6TB drives from Apple (perhaps not the cheapest option but they did deliver very quickly) - one for TimeMachine the other for data. All my photographs are in a partition on the second drive along with my iTunes library. My day to day working files are on the internal drive but I do occasionally copy them to the second drive.

One thing you will find when you do the Migration a lot of your programmes aren't compatible with the current operation system (macOS 10.15 Catalina). Several will also need to be activated by their producer (Microsoft and Adobe come to mind). I lost a lot of small programmes after the move to the new machine including some games, one of which I've been trying to get out of one particular level for years! 32bit programmes are no longer supported by the current OS.

The CCC financial records are stored on a portable hard drive which, if need be in an emergency, can be quickly detached from my iMac and slipped into a pocket. It will also be passed to my successor.

The easiest way is to copy your data to an external disk and then load it onto the new computer. This Apple support page has the details.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204350

If you do not have at least one external disk onto which to backup your data, you should have. If you need to buy one, sooner or later it will repay the investment. Hard drives exist in one of two states - failed or failing. Like anything else, they will all eventually join the choir celestial so having just one copy of anything is a disaster in waiting. At present, as reported on this forum, we have two members with failed disks containg unique data and another who recently had to purchase data recovery software to retrieve the contents of a malfunctioning drive.

If you use Lightroom, you will need to ensure that your images on the new computer are located in an identically bname location as the source. Not fogetting presets, if you have any. As ever, Google is your friend when it comes to finding out how to do anything. I found this video which comes from a well known expert. I have not watched it but if it does not give the information you require, someone else will have put it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2wCK9jDd4

Thanks David and Mike, scary stuff but will no doubt get there in the end. Thanks again x