ericnepean

Q: Migration Strategy

I am now running on a late 2009 27" iMac with OSX 10.10.5. My new 27" iMac with OSX 10.11 is arriving Monday.

 

I think I would like to do a clean install of applications and preferences. The user account I now have has been continuously migrated and upgraded since 2005, and I observe a lot of leftover preferences and other library files from applications I no longer use. Notably this user account starts much slower than other accounts on the same machine.

 

I am quite capable of quickly and efficiently copying the user files from one machine to the other and reinstalling applications. The big question is how do I deal with Apple Mail?. It seems to me that if I copy the entire Library/Mail folder to the new machine I have a problem because the Mail folder will be in 10.10 format, in a 10.11 OS.

 

I have Calendar, Contacts and Notes connected to iCloud, I can just sync the new account with iCloud.

 

I could of course upgrade the old machine to 10.11 before this operation, but I see from this forum that a 10.10 to 10.11 upgrade carries it's own risks.

 

Any helpful comments and suggestions?

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), 2.66GHz Core i5, 16GB RAM

Posted on May 6, 2016 4:32 PM

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