How to Transfer Mac OS X Application Data between Computers
February 16th, 2007
Its been a long time coming, but I finally got a new Mac. I’ve personally owned a Mac of one sort or another since 1987, but I didn’t start using a Mac full time for work until around 2000. I’ve been going through the process of setting up the new machine.
I decided to start from scratch on the new machine, rather than use the migration assistant. The previous machine had been the subject of countless experiments and upgrades. I wanted to start from a clean slate. I chose to reinstall all software and just transfer data files form the old machine to the new one.
I am recording the process on this blog to remind myself for next time and also hoping it might help someone else trying to do the same thing. I’ll probably do this again when I migrate from Tiger (OS X 10.4) to Leopard (OS X 10.5).
This guide may favor the Unix geek, but I’ll try to keep it non-geeky. If you’re uncomfortable with anything here, use the Apple migration assistant instead. These instructions represent what I actually did to move between machines. Your situation may be different. Use these instructions at your own risk. When in doubt, use the Apple supplied migration assistant. Always make backups of your old data.
I’ll assume that you can get your old mac and your new Mac talking on a network (You don’t even need a cross over cable), and that you can figure out how to enable file sharing on your old system so you can transfer your files over.
Do a Clean Install
My Mac came ready to go. All I had to do is turn it on and answer a few networking and registration questions and I was, um productive, making comic books for the kids and playing with the iSight. However, I decided to wipe the hard drive and do a complete re-install.
There were a few reasons for this. One was to be able to play with impunity for a period of time, knowing that I could wash away my mistakes and experiments. Another was to be able to do a custom install. This laptop drive is fairly small for what I want to do with it. During my custom install, I omitted a bunch of printer drivers, trial apps and language translations to save a gig or two. Its never going to be easier to do this than now. Third, I just wanted to make sure that I could rebuild the system from scratch, while I still had a warrenty and tech support available.
I’m extremely conservative with my work system. I rely on it and I want it to work when I need it. I feel its better to allocate a fixed amount of time now to learn how to rebuild, rather than have spend an indeterminate amount of time with it in the event of some mishap.
When I re-installed, the first user I created on the new machine had the same short name as the primary user on the old machine. I haven’t tested these techniques for moving user accounts with different names, but overall I think they should work.
Moving your keychain
The first thing to do after to get your machine is to copy your keychain from your old computer to the new one. The keychain contains all of your passwords. Its also one of the few centralized databases on the Mac that you can’t just regenerate. Its best to migrate it before you launch any programs on the new machine that might require authentication.
You can open the Keychain Access application to view and manage your passwords. Each User’s keychain is stored in their ~/Library/Keychains directory. (The ~ means this directory is a subdirectory of your user home directory.)
I just copied the login.keychain file from the old system and replaced the one on the new system. I would recommend logging out and logging back in after replacing the old file.
You may also want to migrate your system level keychain. This is located in /Library/Keychains/system.keychain. Notice that this is not in your user directory, but is a subdirectory of your main hard drive. I didn’t bother to migrate this one, but rather to enter the handful of passwords that it contained. If you do overwrite this file, make sure you look at its ownership & permissions via get info in the finder first, and restore the permissions after you are done.
You may want to do Keychain First Aid on the File menu of the Keychain Access application after this process, just to make sure everything is ok.
Move your Cookies
I could never figure out why some people are so paranoid about cookies. Here is your chance to get rid of them all. Well, I don’t wear a tin foil hat; I want to keep my cookies. My cookies only take up 1.5MB after years of browsing on my mac. Having a smaller cookie file probably won’t make my browsing experience any better, and there are so many it really isn’t worth trying to sift through them. For me, the best option is to migrate the whole cookie file.
Safari and WebKit cookies are stored in ~/Library/Cookies/cookies.plist. Copying this file from the old machine to the same location on the new machine will transfer all of your cookies.
I don’t do anything cookie-worthy in any browser except Safari, so I didn’t bother migrating any of the cookies in the alternative browsers I have installed. If you have FireFox cookies that you want to preserve, I believe they are located in FireFox’s Application Support folder and will migrate just fine using the generic Migrating a Mac OS X Application instructions below.
Migrating User Data and Documents
Moving your User data is easy. Just open your home folder on the old machine and copy all of the subdirectories you see to the new machine except for the ~/Library direcctory. Actually, you could copy the ~/Library directory wholesale, too, but the purpose of this post is to start with a clean slate of application settings and support files and most of these live in the Library directory.
The typical folders you will copy over are ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, ~/Movies, ~/Music and ~/Pictures. There shouldn’t be anything of consequence in these directories on the new machine. You can probably just replace them. You may also want to copy your ~/Public and ~/Sites directories if you have anything in them.
You want to copy over your data files before you launch any applications that might use that data, for example iPhoto or iTunes.
Migrating a Mac OS X Application
Almost all native OS X applications use the same file organization for their files. The settings for almost all applications can be transferred by looking in two places.
The ~/Library/Application Support directory contains folders with the same name as each application. copy the folders from the old machine to same location on the new machine for the applications whose support data you want to keep.
The ~/Library/Preferences directory contains many individual files (and sometimes a folder or two). The files have a java style naming convention. For example, Safari’s preference file is named com.apple.Safari.plist. Just copy over the preference files for each application that you want to retain the preferences for. Watch out, though, some applications have more than one preference file, such as iTunes.
As part of my clean slate initiative, I only migrated 5 or 6 preference files from my most used and most configured applications, such as iTunes, Safari and Adium.
Mac OS X applications are fairly liberal with these files. In order to conform to the Mac programming guidelines, any OS X application should be able to regenerate a fresh preference file, or a fresh application support file if their file comes up missing. Deleting these files can be a good way to “reset” an application to its standard defaults.
Moving Safari
Safari takes a bit of special consideration to migrate. Safari stores bookmarks, browser history, form auto-fill values, and other data in a special folder located at ~/Library/Safari. Copying this folder to the same location the new system will preserve this information.
Safari Doesn’t have a folder under ~/Library/Application Support, but don’t forget to copy the safari preferences file from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.
Moving Mail
Apple’s Mail.app also requires some special consideration. Mail stores its mail database in ~/Library/Mail. Copying this directory along with the preferences file at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Mail will transfer your mail.
If you are transferring from a 10.3 system, there was a major change in file format for the mail database between 10.3 and 10.4. Mail will automatically upgrade your mail files the first time you run it, however, it will not delete the old files. This apple tech note describes how to delete the unused files from your Mail directory.
Moving iTunes
Moving iTunes depends on your iTunes Music Folder Location and if you have iTunes Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library. These settings are in the Advanced panel of iTunes preferences. Fortunately there are already some pretty good guides on how to do this. There is a Moving iTunes Music Folder tech note from Apple. This is augmented by instructions from HiFi Blog.
Following these instructions, I was able to transfer my iTunes Music without any problems.
Double Check your Library folder
Some applications store data in subdirectories of the Library folder other than Preferences and Application Support. You may wish to peruse the subfolders of the Library directory in your user directory for these stray bits of data. The Apple file organization document can help to tell you what they are and help you to decide if you should copy them over. I didn’t copy anything over, but for a couple exceptions which I’ve already enumerated above.
Don’t copy the ~/Library/Cache directory. This will just be regenerated on the new machine.
Additionally, there is a system wide /Library folder on your Hard drive. You may want to scan this folder for system wide settings that you want to transfer over. Again as part of my clean install, I did not transfer anything from this directory, although I recognized a few bits of software that I needed to install on the new machine.
Unix Stuff
If you’ve accessed the unix side of Mac OS X, you may have a variety of things to move or at least to re-install. These things are beyond the scope of this blog post, but you might want to look for custom settings in /etc or custom installed software in /usr/local or data files in /var. I’ll have a sequel to this post which covers these issues in more detail.
Repairing Permissions
Copying files between systems could end up with some file permissions and ownership problems. I try to keep my files inside my user home directory. So far, I haven’t had any problems. Your milage may vary. It’s probably a good idea to run the Verify Disk Permissions or the Repair Disk Permissions commands in the Disk Utility Application.
Rebuilding a System or Restoring from Backup
You can also use this guide to rebuild a Mac OS X installation, not just to copy from one system to another. The OS X installer has an “Archive and Install” option. If you have enough disk space, you can install a fresh copy of OS X and start from scratch. The installer will copy your old files into an archive directory. Then, you can copy your applications and data from the Archive folder to their proper places.
May you never need to use this guide to restore from a backup, but the same instructions apply. You do back up, right?
More Later
This is the first in a series about setting up a new mac. I’ll have the next installment ready in a couple of days.
I’ve certainly mis-explained some things here. I’ve probably gotten a few things wrong and have definitely omitted important details. Proceed at your own risk. Please share your experiences moving applications in the comments. Best of Luck.
All Posts
February 16th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Thank you for that! It helped me much by setting up a backup strategy for my new Mac Book Pro.
February 16th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Yup, it’s a good reference, to be sure.
Also, welcome back to your blog! I only recently came across it, but I’m really enjoying reading thru the articles and look forward to more!
February 16th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Cool article. I’m gonna need it when leopard comes out. Probably should still work on 10.5.
February 16th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
You don’t even need to network them.
You can use Firewire target disk mode. You can connect one two Macs with a Firewire cable. Start up the Mac containing the data to be copied while holding down the T key. Start the other Mac up normally. Now the first Mac will appear as an external hard disk on the second Mac and you can download files just as you would from a hard disk.
For details see:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583
February 28th, 2007 at 11:39 am
how do i completely move everything from my old HD onto a new hd i want to install. i have everything backed up on and external volume? is it as simple as restoring everything to the new HD? Thanks!
March 11th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
thanks, i’ve just rebuilt my powerbook and forgot the process to transfer Apple Mail
March 15th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Hello - Hey I was just wondering where you got the background design for this website - I really like it.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:25 am
Using Apple’s Migration program and a Firewire connection proved to be an almost pain-free method of transferring just about everything between my old iBook and a newly purchased, albeit used, Mac Powerbook. Only one minor app didn’t make the “crossing,” and it was easily reinstalled.
I have one question pertaining to this, however.
I do quite a bit of imaging work using various incarnations of Adobe’s Photoshop.
I often have to Ctrl-click on an image to bring up Tiger/Mac’s “Open With” dialog box, then arrow over and down to pick the App I want to work with. For some reason, this “Open With” contains all kinds of items that are not Applications and make it a chore to wade through. These items–all of which, I have noted, have the Windows extension .exe appended–seem to pertain to various parts of Adobe PS, and are holdovers from the previous owner of this Powerbook. How they got there I have no idea.
In any case, I would like to “clean” the “Open With” dialog box and have it only display necessary Applications. Is there a simple way to delete/remove these annoying and useless bits and pieces from the “Open With” dialog box?
Thank you, and please feel free to contact me directly: dashone@toast.net.
April 5th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Thanks for the article. Just what I was looking for. I had a pretty good idea of what to do, but it was great to find an article by someone who’s actually done it! I’ve just ordered a Mac Pro (didn’t go 8-core, it’s overkill for me) and it’ll be here in a couple of days. I want to migrate bits and pieces from my Mac Mini G4. This article is just about to be printed out and will be my reference for when my new toy arrives
Cheers!
April 6th, 2007 at 7:33 am
I recently installed a brand new iMac. At the time of installation of this iMac, I transferred user files from my PowerPC based PowerBook G4, running Mac OS X Tiger, through firewire. After this is done, my PowerBook has been behaving badly. For example, when I open pdf files (generated using pdflatex), I get all funny characters. I suspect something went wrong with my PowerBook after the firewire based transfer. I am worried that there could be other problems as well. Do you have any thoughts on this? Thanks.
April 19th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
And don’t forget ~/.ssh and ~/.pgp or ~/.gnugpg if you use SSH and PGP/GPG. Thanks for the tips! /s
April 25th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
I also noticed a folder titled ~/Library/MailDownloads next to the Mail folder, which appears to be all the attachments I’ve ever received.
May 28th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Many thanks for this article! I’m about to wipe my MacBook’s drive clean and start over. (In my case, Migration Assistant seems to have created many problems. Either that or I’m using too much non-Universal software. I’m hoping clean installing everything will make for a more stable OS.)
Cheers!
June 12th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
dude! how do i transfer my CS2 from my G5 to my macbook pro! i got it to pull up but i cant get out of the activation mode. should i try activating? I do not have the disc, but i have my key#’s. Please help.Thanks
June 12th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
it keeps telling me i have one or more files in the Adobe Application Support folder, necessary for running Photoshop, are missing. Please run the photoshop installer and re-install photoshop.
June 17th, 2007 at 5:37 am
thanks for this article - just rebuilt my wife’s ibook from a back up on an external drive after the hard drive died - no problems here! She is very happy.
the only thing I might add was the stuff about iTunes made it look fraught with potential danger but I just grabbed the whole iTunes folder from the music folder on the backup and dragged it across and it worked fine
July 1st, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Thanks for the tutorial on the mail application, I was having some trouble as it wanted to re-download all 10,000 messages from my pop3 account! Now it works great! I was missing that little section from the preferences folder.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Thanks loads — I just had to do a clean install of 10.4. I’d used Migration Assistant to set up the machine initially, but it never did seem very stable. Quicktime was weird, things kept crashing and going slowly. Finally last week my machine froze solid after Software Update (10.4.10) and I just decided to do a clean install. Your instructions were immensely helpful — thanks!
September 28th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
question
possible to trasfer via fw between a osx computer and a mac os 8.6 computer system?
October 9th, 2007 at 10:54 am
This is very helpful. But, I have a question. If I am having problems with keychain because of a recent update and just want to replace everything in my keychain from a recent backup, how would I go about doing that?
November 6th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
I’ve been looking for something like this since I did a fresh install of Leopard. I backed up everything but did not clone my drive to be bootable so I couldnt use Migration Assistant. My biggest concern was transfering my mail setting and data both with os mail and entourage. I’ve been unsucessful bc I didnt know where to look and where to move the files. The folders are a bit diferent in Leopard but thus tutorial at least points me in the right direction. Does anyone use entourage? Where is the data and user settings normally stored?
Thanks again
November 6th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
I’ve been looking for something like this since I did a fresh install of Leopard. I backed up everything but did not clone my drive to be bootable so I couldnt use Migration Assistant. My biggest concern was transfering my mail setting and data both with os mail and entourage. I’ve been unsucessful bc I didnt know where to look and where to move the files. The folders are a bit diferent in Leopard but thus tutorial at least points me in the right direction. Does anyone use entourage? Where is the data and user settings normally stored?
Thanks again
November 8th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Thanks for the tutorial - I’m about to jump in. As with ILover, I’m also wondering about moving Entourage from old to new Mac. Suggestions?. Also, the firewire connection from my five-year-old Emac to new IMac is not working. I can get into my new computer from my old but not the inverse. Also strange becauase it works fine with a new MacBook Pro and and older Power Mac.
Thanks…
November 27th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Great tutorial. One thing not mentioned is moving the custom spelling file “en” located at ~/Library/Spelling. It includes all the items you have had the computer “Learn” over the years/months.
December 8th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
I am getting a new quad-core 2.66Ghz Mac Pro, and currently am running a 7-year old G4 867 Mhz Mac, with OS 10.4.11 (Tiger). The new Mac is being shipped with Tiger onboard, with OS 10.5 (Leopard) included on an install disk. My plan is to FireWire the two computers together, target-disk the old one, and clone my old drive onto the new Mac. I’m unsure about the Migration Assistant, and don’t want to install Leopard until I have all my apps and files on the new computer, because I’ve read that there are some bugs yet to work out, so I hope my plan works! If this sounds like a disaster in the making, please reply and stop me. My son, who is an engineer, is biting his nails on my behalf, but I am fairly confident that all my network settings and other stuff will transfer over without a problem.
January 27th, 2008 at 2:22 am
The mail program seems to have another folder in the library folder called Mail Downloads that also needs to migrate.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:29 am
Question: I transferred all applications from MacBook Pro to Mac Air. Most of the Adobe CS Suite apps, and some others, show up twice on the Mac Air - generally with display like:
Adobe Photoshop CS3
Adobe Photoshop CS3 (From Old Mac)
Why the double entry? Which one can I delete to regain disk space?
February 16th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Thanks! I was having trouble moving all my mail (including the accounts) to my new iMac, it was ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Mail that I was missing.
February 28th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
great posting. sometimes it’s easy to forget the small things (ie, plist’s). thanks so much for taking the time and posting the info..
March 5th, 2008 at 6:56 am
I’m having trouble with safaris autofill information. I moved the contents of my old Powerbooks safari into the new safari folder under Users and then library,but it’s not there. Do you know exactly which safari folder contains the autofill info for user names and passwords??? Thanks!
March 14th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Thank you! The mail migration portion of your article was incredibly useful.
March 31st, 2008 at 6:22 am
Simply amazing. I had on old G4 Yikes! model with a parallel ATA drive. I purchased a refurbed Mac G5 Quad 2.5Ghz and an external Firewire enclosure for my old G4 drive. I FIRST MADE BACKUP DVDs OF ALL CRUCIAL DATA AND CLIENT ARTWORK. Then, I installed the old G4 drive in the enclosure, mounted the “new” firwire drive, ran migration assistant and started hooking up peripherals to the new machine while it was running. I accidentally disconnected the firewire cable to the external drive mid migration!! Calmly (NOT), I restarted, remounted and reran migration assistant. Less than an hour and a half later it was finished (90GB worth of data and apps and archived client graphic design work). Instantly, everything was available data-wise, but needed to reboot to see if all the user settings, keychains, passwords and apps were functional. Restart: up popped my desktop background image and all the desktop icons that used to be on my old G4! Itunes on the new machine was older than the one I did the backup with, so I ran disk utility and repaired permissions, and then ran software update and installed all the patches and updates for everything including itunes. It liked that and it solved the “old version” error message that popped up when it said it couldn’t import my library since it was archived by a newer version. Opened every app and they all worked properly with every preference set just as the original from the old G4.
The only problem I had was “re-authorizing” the new G5 Quad for itunes for everyone in my family. I guess that info is stored on the internet instead of in some keychain on the hard drive…
I can only say that this was THE single most pleasant experience I have ever had migrating data/software from one computer (any flavor) to another.
Just remember:
1. Backup backup backup
2. Run disk utility and repair permissions prior to migration
3. DO NOT MESS AROUND WITH WIRES WHILE MIGRATING (LOL)
4. Reboot, update software and then…
5. Run disk utility and repair permissions again.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:33 pm
This was amazing information. Thank you. I used the Migration Assistant at first but it didn’t work well for me. This method produced no headaches and I saved space!
All the best,
Oscar
May 10th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Hello,
How do i transfer my entourage from one mac to the other complete with email and accounts and configurations? just like if i was using time capsule between a new mac and an old one.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:34 am
So helpful thanks heaps!
June 29th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Khaled-
If memory serves I think you should just have to move your Microsoft User Data folder located in your Documents folder from your old machine to the Documents folder of your new machine. Then do the same with the Microsoft folder in your Preferences folder. Move it to the like folder on your new machine.