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Q: Need help (possibly manually) restoring Safari bookmarks, Mail, etc.

I just had my late 2013 iMac recovered after the boot-up was having problems. Since Apple doesn't do file recovery, I took the computer to a reputable Apple repair guy who said he had never had to transfer so much data... 1.25TB. He also said that while he was able to recover the data, he didn't think he'd be able to restore all of my non-OS programs, like Photoshop, etc. Probably something to do with the hard drive. He did some diagnostics on it, and he felt there was something wrong with the drive, but recommended I take the computer to the Apple Store first and have them look at it. They looked at it and "rebuilt" the Fusion drive and put El Capitan on there (I was using Yosemite). Took the computer back to my guy and he reinstalled all the backed up data.

 

So I have all my photos that were in Aperture, iPhoto, etc. and I have all my Mail and Calendar stuff, all my Safari bookmarks and "read later" bookmarks (whatever Apple calls that... I always forget), etc.

 

But *none* of it is currently being seen by the new apps. I know Aperture and iPhoto will probably be a daunting task. I need to upgrade to Lightroom since Apple doesn't support those programs.

 

However, I'm assuming Safari, Mail, iCal and other standard apps which are currently installed should be able to be "manually" restored with all my backed up data, no? How do I do it? I've tried searching for "mail" and "safari" and "bookmarks", but there's soooo much data and not all of it makes sense.

 

If anybody knows how to do this, your suggestions will be greatly appreciated. If this task continues to be daunting, I may just hire someone to help me remotely. But until then, I appreciate all suggestions.

 

Here's a list of apps I need to figure out how to manually update with all of my backed up data. I have no idea how to do it.

 

Aperture (I need to install this first... haven't tried yet... and ultimately need to transition to Lightroom immediately)

iPhoto (should I just import into "Photo"?)

Mail

iCal

Contacts

Messages

Notes

Safari

Stickies

Google Chrome browser

Firefox

Camino (yes believe it or not! have old bookmarks on there I need to transfer over... maybe import into Safari?)

 

You may be asking why isn't all this on my iCloud? I don't know. I have never been able to figure that thing out. Between my iPhone, my Macbook Pro and my old iMac, my experience in years past is that it's a huge jumble of errors and duplicates and things never working as I planned.   So yeah, I probably should get that set up.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), 27/ 3.5 GHz / 32MB RAM / 3TB Fusion

Posted on Sep 6, 2016 5:41 AM