The IT Nerd

Good question!

First, let me describe what the Migration Assistant is. Apple includes a utility called the Migration Assistant on every Mac to move your files from either your old Mac to a new one, or from a PC to a Mac. The instructions are pretty straightforward to get the job done.

Now why didn’t I use it in this case? If I was moving from one Mac to another, there is value in using this because user accounts, user files, applications, printer selection, network settings and other system and user settings from one Macintosh computer to another computer, or from a Time Machine backup. That’s a huge time saver.

However on the PC side of the fence, it’s slightly different. It will move stuff like mail messages, accounts, contacts, documents etc into the right places. But they will only move into the equivalent Mac application. For example, if you’re moving your mail messages from Outlook, they will go into Mail. If you are moving bookmarks from Internet Explorer, they will go into Safari. If you want them to go into some other application such as Outlook 2011 for Mac or Firefox, then you’re out of luck. Thus I prefer to move stuff manually from PC to Mac. It does require more work and some extra technical knowledge to get it done, but I feel more comfortable doing it this way.

This entry was posted on November 21, 2012 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Tips with tags Apple, Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.