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Migrating to an old mac

I've searched and searched, but apparently I'm the first person to have a question about this:


I need to transfer my old macbook to a used macbook with content on it. Will the migration assistant replace the content with my content, or will it merge the two? Do I need to factory reset the old mac first? My goal is to replace the content on the hand-me-down computer with my content. Thanks!

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Nov 29, 2011 8:15 PM

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Posted on Nov 30, 2011 4:52 AM

You can do it both ways. You can use migration assistant to migrate your old User Account to your new mac, then log in to that account and everything should be how you left it. Then simply delete any other accounts that exist on the new mac. Just make sure before you start that there are no user accounts on the new mac with the same user name as the one you are importing. Only problem with doing it this way is that any applications that already exist on the new mac will remain there and I'm not sure how Migration Assistant will handle duplicate applications. You would probably be better off to to a clean install of your OS on the new mac, then use Migration Assistant to bring over everything.


If you are completely happy with your old system you could always use an app likke carbon copy cloner to simply duplicate the contents of your old drive on to the new one. You haven't listed the specs of the two machines, so this info would be on the assumption that both machines were capable of running the same OS.

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Nov 30, 2011 4:52 AM in response to rainingfrogs

You can do it both ways. You can use migration assistant to migrate your old User Account to your new mac, then log in to that account and everything should be how you left it. Then simply delete any other accounts that exist on the new mac. Just make sure before you start that there are no user accounts on the new mac with the same user name as the one you are importing. Only problem with doing it this way is that any applications that already exist on the new mac will remain there and I'm not sure how Migration Assistant will handle duplicate applications. You would probably be better off to to a clean install of your OS on the new mac, then use Migration Assistant to bring over everything.


If you are completely happy with your old system you could always use an app likke carbon copy cloner to simply duplicate the contents of your old drive on to the new one. You haven't listed the specs of the two machines, so this info would be on the assumption that both machines were capable of running the same OS.

Nov 30, 2011 8:38 AM in response to Andrew Wolczyk

Thanks! That answers my question. Sounds like I'll have to factory restart the hand-me-down macbook. They're pretty similar machines: the old one, whose keyboard stopped working, is a late 2007 macbook with 120GB harddrive and the newer one is an early 2008 macbook with a 120GB harddrive. So I don't think there'd be space for it to hold content from both.


I also plan to move the 4GB RAM that I installed in the old one into the new one that only has 2GB. I'm assuming the safest way is to time machine backup the old mac, reset the newer mac, turn everything off and switch the RAM. Then follow instructions on the newer mac to set it up using the older mac. If that fails, I'll always have the time machine backup.

Migrating to an old mac

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