I have an outdated G5 and want to transfer the data (downloaded music, documents etc.)? Is there an easy way to do this? I was advised to buy a hard drive, transfer data to the hard drive and then move it to the mac mini
See the instructions for Migration Assistant:Move your content to a new Mac - Apple Support
You can also connect the two Macs with a standard ethernet wire, then open the source machines hard drive on the destination machine's desktop and just drag the directories to the new machine.
How old is the Mac Mini? Migration Assistant doesn't support moving from 10.5 to 10.10 as far as I can tell.
You have a few options, but the HD option seems like a good idea to me because you can make a full bootable copy of the ageing hardware & keep it as an independent backup. The G5 may not boot from USB, so you may need a USB + Firewire drive.
If you want to copy via the network you will need to enable file sharing on one of the Macs & then use Finder to connect to it.
Another option is to use Target disk mode…
OS X Mountain Lion: Transfer files between two computers using target disk mode
You will need a Firewire to Thunderbolt cable (or just Firewire if the Mini has that).
Migration Assistant in OS X Mavericks and Yosemite can transfer information from other computers that have OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.8 or later installed. If you're migrating from a computer with an earlier version of OS X, update your older computer first, or manually copy your data from one computer to another.
I agree with what you said in your post: do it by hand and move only data, not the apps or settings. Personally I have bad experiences with Migration Assistant when bringing items from an (very) old mac to a very new mac.
how do i transfer data from one computer to the next?
