Book Reviews


[Day Permalink] Tuesday, November 18, 2008

[Item Permalink] Transferring files to the Macbook Pro -- Comment()
I finally managed to move over my files from to old Titanium PowerBook G4 to the new Macbook Pro. In the end, I used an external USB/Firewire hard disk - using Firewire 400 with the TiBook, and USB 2.0 with the MBP. Everything seems to be more or less as it should, or I hope so.

I even got my Unix environment set up the way I want. I'm using /bin/tcsh as my shell (from old habit) and Emacs of course, with some tweaks. And I also managed to set up ssh with Mac keychain integration. That was a bit of a surprise, I didn't expect it to work right away but so it did. So, I'm happy user of the new machine.

I even did a bit of a daring thing - there was a replacement (faster etc.) hard drive delivered with the machine, which I hadn't installed because I needed to use the machine right away. Well, today I made a Time Machine backup of the MBP to an external hard disk, replaced the internal hard disk (easy to do, remove one screw only), and installed the Mac OS X and all my files from the external TM backup disk using the Mac OS X installer.

Surprisingly, there we no hiccups - well, Mail did go through all the files at startup, but after that it behaved as it should. Yes, and PowerPoint started up with a incompletely saved last file - I had forgotten to save that file to disk before running Time Machine. But in relative terms - switching from one hard disk to another without any problems - that was really something. It took about on hour, but I didn't need to do anything during that time, just wait for the data transfer to finish.

I must say that I'm impressed with Time Machine. I wish all software would work like this, just the way it is supposed to. Switching machines - or hard disks - is no pain with a system like that.