Hiking Yosemite... Migration w/o Migration Assistant or TM

[MIDI Life Crisis]

It has been a long hike up this mountain called OS X 10.10.1 and it has not been all fun and games. It's the little things that threw obstacles in the way. In most cases, it's all about updates (or lack thereof) from software developers or licenses and licensing apps that need attention. These aspects can really have you chasing your tail.

Legacy software from older systems that you "migrate" to the new OS (and presumably the new hard rive if you're smart) can also be problematic, so here's a great way to migrate without Migration Assistant.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202910

I don't think I will use any other method in the future. It's a long process but you have total control and none of the Time Machine or Migration Assistant hangs.

[mikehalloran]

Danger Will Robibson! There's something missing from that page. Permissions and privileges.

This is not an issue as long as you don't use, say... Office or Digital Performer (after 7.01) or FileMaker or... If you know anyone who does, that person will have problems with the files after porting them over.

There is an easy workaround and it should have been mentioned: Archive (zip) your files before bringing them over. Email also works as it zips your files first. As you unzip them on the new machine, the OS grants them the proper privileges and permissions for them to work on the new one.

If you have the disk space on the old drive, it's very easy. You can compress your entire Music folder, copy it over to the new Mac and then trash the original Archive. Next do Documents, Pictures, Movies, Desktop etc.

If tight on drive space, it has to be done in smaller bites.

Been there, done that, learned the hard way.

[Michael Canavan]

Just want to say because only you guys understand, every single way to do this sucks.
Some suck slightly less, that's all.

It goes without saying that it sucks more for plug ins with weird copy protection schemes. I haven't even installed anything from Arturia or FXPansion yet because of this. iLock does indeed win this game, painless, and MOTU are not horrible either, but I think it's shear luck that during this migration from a regular hard drive to a SSD and new CPU that MOTU's two license policy happened to lock the old HD and not my macbook pro...

One glaring thing in Yosemite for me was Logitech do not have a Yosemite driver yet for their mice. Luckily I have a copy of USB Overdrive, and honestly considering he updates and maintains his software with full features in the Logitech mouse I don't think I'll bother with their sometimes sub par drivers.

Also the little death march of discontinued software I've decided would be better off not being installed on this machine...

[mikehalloran]

Moving Arturia and FXpansion licenses is very easy if you saved the email that came with the licenses -- as I found out when I did my clean install in November. This is true for a number of plugins.

For all of those email, I use the Export to PDF function in the Apple Mail client. There's a folder called Installers in my Documents Folder. I export those email to that folder and the PDF file now preserves my licenses and links--and I know where to find them when I need.

The easiest way to move files manually is to copy them from your Time Machine backup. No need to Archive and expand. If you allowed indexing of your backup, it's easy to search and restore on a file or folder basis. Pretty fast, too.

[Michael Canavan]

Moving Arturia and FXpansion licenses is very easy if you saved the email that came with the licenses -- as I found out when I did my clean install in November. This is true for a number of plugins.

The serials etc. I have. The Expansion problem is their strict license count installer. I 'ran out' because a couple years ago I bought a new laptop, and recently upgraded the Mac Pro. Had to email tech support on that.

Arturia are harder, definitely have to email support, because they only allow one license per user. I haven't broken down and gotten an eLicenser as they're the only plug ins I own that require that one.
It tends to be one of those things though, takes a couple days. Komplete was pretty easy, though a good day and a phone call because Battery 4 does weird things with it's library if you attempt to install just the plug in again.