Recently I got my hands on a new copy of the OSX for the mac. The new Snow Leopard. I decided to wait for a bit to see if it ironed out some of its early blips before i would migrate. I talked to some of my friends that had MACS and what was the best way to migrate, they suggested use Time Machine. I purchased a new passport hard drive, ran time machine and backed up everything. When it came to installing the new operating system, I completely wiped the hard drive before installing the new OS. As I booted it for the first time it asked me did I want to restore files and applications from a Time Machine backup? I plugged in the hard drive and voila, it copied down all my applications and files.

A couple of questions then came to mind here:

• How simple is this to migrate to a different OS and there has to be some catch here?
• There has to be some/tons of applications that just don’t work after doing this?
• I reckon I have to have lost something here or an entire folder? and why can’t you migrate windows XP this simply?

The results of the findings

To see how well this whole process went I wanted to test the following:

• ITunes, Skype, Chrome, Parallels, Safari, Mail, Mozy (icon missing but it works) and Ms Office all kept their settings & files and all work.
• I use Intellij, Flex Builder, MAMP, Photoshop and Grails. I tried most of the Flex applications, all worked perfectly. OSX needed to install Rosetta for Flex but it did that itself and it works.
• The desktop and all my documents seem to be in place.

This has to be the simplest and most painless migration I have ever done, fair play to the developers who wrote Time Machine.

The only application that doesn’t seem to be working is MenuMeters, there is a new release of this too.

On the new OSX… it seems to be a lot snappier than the last one. I have 4 gigs of ram but generally things like spotlight and safari seem to behave and react a lot quicker than with the previous OS. The new expose is nicer too and easier to pick out the application or window you are trying to get to.

Tips:

Hard drives are cheap these days, buy an external hard drive just for Time Machine, this will do the extra files and applications where Mozy won’t be able to.

If i was doing this again, I would take a couple of backups. Firstly, I would take a backup of everything as it stands, next I would take what I deemed to be a “clean” backup of the OS, removing unwanted applications and files and use that as the basis for your new install. The options in Time Machine are not great in that it is an all or nothing approach to restoring the computer from a backup at installation time.