Maintaining User data upgrading an Old Mac


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hi,

I am about to upgrade an old iMac G5 computer. It currently has 512mb RAM and an old diening hard drive and is runnning OSX 10.2

I plan to upgrade teh RAM to its maximum 2GB. Replace the hard drive with a shiny new one and load it with OS 10.5.x (which I have bought for it already).

I am ok with backing up manually all the pictures, documents, msic, misc files etc, but I need to maintain the Mail settings and content, safari bookmarks, and firefox bookmarks amongst possible other application data.

Is there and easy way to do this ? such as a Transfer wizard like windows has, or a third party tool ? or am I going to have to trawl each application, figure out where it stores its data and do it manaully ?

I realise 10.5 has a migration wizard but it requires you to connect to the old mac with the new one, as I am replacing the hdd and not moving to a new Mac this wont be possible.

Thanks in advance

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Well, you can take the old hard drive out, pop it into an external enclosure and connect it by USB. When you install Leopard, it'll ask you if you want to migrate your data from another source. There you go. :yes:

If you don't have an enclosure that you can open and close easily, then you could always just use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your whole hard drive to an external drive.

Just as a side note: I will say that I don't know if the migration tool in Leopard works with something as old as Jaguar, but you'll find out. If not, well, no worries. You'll have your whole drive, so you can just pick your data out. It'll all be in your user's Library folder (/Users/Your Username/Library/).

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boot the Leopard DVD, do an "Archive and Install" i think, and let it install

upon 1st boot it will ask you the usual questions like, time zone, dot-mac login details, registration. somewhere in there it will say "Migrate user data from yer old Macintosh" or something similar, and it will offer: Transfer from another Macintosh, Transfer from this Macintosh, and an option to opt-out.

that *should* transfer the user settings for stuff like Mail and iPhoto

(note: i have never tried this option on any of my Macs before, never bothered, so i may be wrong)

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boot the Leopard DVD, do an "Archive and Install" i think, and let it install

upon 1st boot it will ask you the usual questions like, time zone, dot-mac login details, registration. somewhere in there it will say "Migrate user data from yer old Macintosh" or something similar, and it will offer: Transfer from another Macintosh, Transfer from this Macintosh, and an option to opt-out.

that *should* transfer the user settings for stuff like Mail and iPhoto

(note: i have never tried this option on any of my Macs before, never bothered, so i may be wrong)

Unfortunately, he's swapping his hard drive out. He could always just do two copies: one to the external drive and then one back before he installs, but I don't see the point. :p

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Unfortunately, he's swapping his hard drive out. He could always just do two copies: one to the external drive and then one back before he installs, but I don't see the point. :p

o

well, if he puts the old drive into an external case, i am pretty sure the wizard will pick up on it and do the same thing

(note to self: don't post at midnight!)

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