How To Migrate Your Data from An OLD Mac to A NEW Mac

there are four different ways that you can migrate data from an old Mac over to a new one so today what I'm going to be doing is talking about those different methods and which one might be best for you and your situation I'll also be giving you plenty of little tips tricks and advice along the way how to migrate your data from an old Mac to a new one coming up next on Tech Talk America [Music] there are basically four different ways that you can migrate data from an old Mac over to a new Mac they include using migration assistant time machine you can use a cloud service like iCloud or other third-party services like Dropbox or Google Drive or you can manually transfer it by far the easiest way to transfer your stuff from old computer to new computer is to just use the migration assistant utility which comes built-in to your Mac it's very very easy to use it can take some time and one of the things that you should know is there are a couple of situations where you do not want to use this feature for example let's say you like me have been a Big Mac fan forever and you've had Mac after Mac after Mac and every time you've done that if you've migrated your data it might be a good idea to the next time consider not doing that because there is a certain amount of junk that tends to go from computer to computer and it's just easier at a certain point to kind of start fresh so that's where one of the other methods might be best for you in order to use migration assistant all you need to do is on your old computer you're going to go up to the top right corner to where we have spotlight and you can just type in the word migration and it'll probably be the first item that pops up from here you're going to just double click on migration assistant by the way that application is actually located in your utilities folder which is inside the Applications folder from here you're just going to click a couple of buttons just to kind of set it up into the mode where it's ready to transmit all of your data over to a new computer when you're done with that on the new computer you're going to turn it on I believe it's either the third or fourth screen on the new computer there's gonna be an option to migrate your data from your old Mac and at that point that's where it's gonna kind of link up the two computers with each other and it's just gonna start transferring everything over Wi-Fi now this will take a fairly long time depending on how much data you have so you might want to consider running this process overnight if you decide that this is going to be the best method for you to migrate your data and once you've made the decision that you're going to be buying a new Apple computer I would advise that you stop running software update on your old Mac here's the basic reason why if you buy a new Apple computer and it comes preloaded with an older operating system or even just an update but that would make it older than your old computer there's a problem when you go to migrate the data now you can resolve it it usually involves a quick call to tech support it's not the worst thing in the world this is just me trying to save you a potential headache the next method that you can use to transfer your data is to use time machine now for those of you who are not familiar time machine is a piece of software that comes with every Mac and all that you need to do to enable it is to turn it on and buy an external hard drive so what it's going to do is it's going to just take kind of snapshots of everything on your computer so that you can restore data either from like a single point in time if you're trying to seek out a specific file or you can use it to restore everything so again in order to do this you do need an external hard drive this is for example mine this is a 4 terabyte Seagate and one things I love about these is that the prices have really come down on these so if you need a recommendation on a backup hard drive I have links to several different types on my website over at Tech Talk America comm / product recommendations one other thing I want to bring up at this point for any of you out there who are going to one of the new Mac laptops on basically all the different models they have changed the connections yet again so that there are ports that you no longer have and this leaves some people out in the dark so if you need to be able to plug in old accessories there is a gadget that I would strongly recommend that you get they are different depending on which model of Mac you get but this is the one that I have I actually by the way I actually have two of these things I am not kidding this is the kwak kwak great product name right so in this case what it does is we have two USB C connections and then on the other side you can see I get back all of those handy connections that I now have lost USB 3.0 SD micro sd and so and then on the other side we have two USB sea ports so I could be for example charging my Mac and also have an additional port beyond that these things are also very inexpensive links to everything down below the next method that you can use to move your stuff is to use a cloud service so it could be that you use iCloud to do this you can use Google Drive you could use Dropbox so there's dozens of other cloud services out there the same basic concept what you're going to be doing here is you're going to be taking the data that's on the old computer and you can move it to the cloud so in the case of Dropbox or Google Drive usually with those what you're going to do is you're going to be physically moving all of your files off of your desktop out of the Documents folder out of the pictures folder and move them all into that cloud storage so what that will do is it'll upload it so that if your old computers hard drive fails doesn't matter as long as you can get it there in time you'll be good because the thing here is that if your old computer is failing and you try to do migration assistant and it does fail at that point you are going to be looking at a major headache another option that you should be aware of is if your old Mac is running at least Mac OS Sierra then one of the features that is built into that operating system is the desktop and documents feature which is part of iCloud drive so if you want to use this method here's how you're going to set it up on your old computer you're gonna go into the Apple menu from there go and choose System Preferences then go into iCloud and here at the very top where it says iCloud drive you see how it says options well we're gonna click on that and the very first option here is desktop and documents folder so this just means anything that you have in those two locations automatically are gonna go up to the cloud when you sign into iCloud on your new computer everything comes right back I think every Apple tech out there will agree that the number one thing that everyone forgets to do when they get a new Mac is everyone forgets to deauthorize iTunes on their old Mac so the way that you can do this is just open up iTunes and under the navigation menu go under accounts go under authorizations and tell it to do eyes that computer now there are a couple of other things that you need to keep in mind before you migrate your data first of all let's talk a little bit about software any software that you have on your old Mac that requires a serial number when you first installed it is not going to run on the new computer unless you re enter in that authorization code now this most commonly affects Microsoft Office any products made by Intuit and also a lot of Adobe software out there now let's go through some of these options one by one because there may be alternatives that you're not aware of now the current as of today's date version of Microsoft Office is all subscription based if you would like to still get a copy that you can own without any kind of reoccurring charges there is a copy of Mac our Office for Mac 2016 that you can download off Amazon and there's a link to it down below now this is good for a couple of different reasons see I mentioned that you need to hold on to that authorization code and this is the thing everyone loses them by buying the software through Amazon they store your code online so that if down the road you need to get another Mac provided that that software is still compatible you'll be able to log in through your Amazon account pull up that same registration code and you're good to go now for any of you out there who use the Adobe Photoshop products you might want to consider just checking out some of the alternatives these days that are not subscription-based for example two of the pieces of software that I love are affinity which you can get right through the Mac App Store or Pixelmator also through the Mac App Store great pieces of software way less money and can do most not all but quite a bit of what Photoshop could do and if you have enjoyed products you're probably just gonna have to buy them again sorry now of course the final method that you could use to move your data from old computer to new would be to use something like a flash drive or an external hard drive and just manually move it this is a great solution for people with relatively simple needs and frankly between this and iCloud usually you can get pretty much everything another thing to keep in mind before you migrate is that no matter which method you do you're probably going to have to re-enter in all the passwords to your email accounts so I'm just telling you that now so that if you have yet to write them down you might want to consider doing that before you do this migration keep in mind if you also ever want to take a private lesson with yours truly that is something that I do remotely it's something I'm able to do a lot more in the winter not so much in the summer but if you want to find out information about that it's on my website at Tech Talk America comm slash private lessons thanks for watching everyone this is david a cox with tech talk america class dismissed you

Channel: Tech Talk America

Views: 582,699

Keywords: migrate, migration, migration assistant, data, data transfer, mac to mac, mac, macbook pro, macbookpro, macbook, move data, move, transfer, icloud, time machine, how-to, how to, old mac, new mac, g-drive, affinity, pixelmator, cloud storage, the cloud, deauthorize itunes, dropbox, google drive, icloud drive, hard drive, hard drive failure, moving data, migrating data, how to transfer macbook to macbook, david a cox

Id: _7kv6Pvti8I

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018