Apple's Setup Assistant Makes Life Easier

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If you read my column in the Houston Chronicle last week (Dr. Mac 02.22.05), some of what follows may sound familiar to you. While today's Rants & Raves column covers much of the same ground as last week's newspaper column, this rendition is nearly three times the size and includes never-before-seen screen shots and photos.

And, this version has the benefit of hindsight: There are things that were left out of the original column for whatever reason that are included here as well as notes from several readers that may provide additional insight.

Anyway, the columns are about the little-known and mostly unheralded Setup Assistant, which makes moving your data from one Mac to another almost painless.

Many of my friends, relatives, and readers have told me that the one thing that concern them when they get a new Mac are transferring their personal data from the old Mac to the new one.

That's quite understandable. With all of Mac OS X's permissions, invisible files, user accounts, and so on, you can't just drag folders from one Mac to another and expect things to work properly.

Fortunately, it's as easy as 1, 2, 3 to make your new Mac look and feel like your old Mac with the Setup Assistant that's included with every new Mac.

If you have another Mac with built-in FireWire, you can transfer all of your stuff-your user accounts, documents, third-party applications, and even network and account settings. The only caveats are that your old Mac must have built-in FireWire and support Target Disk Mode (which most modern Macs do). And, of courses, you'll need a FireWire cable.

Here's the story: When you turn on your new Mac for the first time the Setup Assistant appears as shown in Figure 1.

If you click Continue in the first screen, you'll be logged out as the Setup Assistant takes over your new Mac.

The first step is to connect the two Macs with a standard 6-pin to-6-pin FireWire cable.

The second step is to restart your old Mac in Target Disk Mode by pressing and holding down the "T" key when you power up or restart. Keep pressing the "T" key until you see the FireWire logo appear on your screen; if you don't you'll just have to restart the old Mac again.

Finally, the third step is to select the information you wish to transfer-user accounts, network settings, applications, and data files and folders-as shown in Figure 4.

And that's all she wrote! Click the Transfer button and go have fun somewhere else for a while-it took around two hours for Setup Assistant to transfer roughly 70GB of files from my old G5 to the new 17-inch PowerBook I'm evaluating.

Setup Assistant works like a charm. Almost everything on the new PowerBook was just as it was on the old G5. A few System Preferences from the old Mac weren't transferred, and neither were my printer settings. But they were easily fixed and what's even better is that only a couple of applications, utilities, and games, preference panes, and other software on my hard drive required reinstallation or re-licensing.

I've had no trouble with Setup Assistant and I've used it at least a dozen times to date. But others haven't been quite so lucky. What follows are reports of problems with Setup Assistant that were sent to me by two Houston Chronicle readers after the initial column ran:

The Setup Assistant appears to have worked too well in my case. After transferring all my stuff from my iBook and my new iMac G5, my iPod can't seem to tell them apart; it will sync with both of them with asking. Quite a bummer to learn when I took my iBook on the road and used my iPod to transfer some data; 2000+ songs became 20 while 1000 miles from my iTunes library.

and

I recently used the Apple Setup Assistant to transfer data from my G4 iMac to our new G5 iMac. I was suitably impressed with the ease and thoroughness of the process, especially the ability to selectively choose which account(s) to transfer to the new machine. When the Setup Assistant was finished, the only apparent difference in logging in to my account was that the screen was larger.

Turns out, however, that it is just a bit too thorough. Along with all the data, it also copied the Name of the computer. This created issues with the Printer Setup Utility and with iSync, as there were suddenly two computers on my LAN with the name of "G4 iMac." Simply re-naming the machine in the Sharing preference pane did nothing to solve the issue with iSync. After much back-and-forth with a (very helpful) Apple tech support person, I ultimately had to dump most of my preference files and do an archive-and-install of the system software.

It seems as though much of my pain could have been avoided if the Setup Assistant had just stepped outside of itself to request a unique name for the new Mac.

I'm not sure what caused either issue but thought I should mention them; perhaps you'll see something in them that I didn't see.

Last, but certainly not least, another reader found a unique use for the Setup Assistant, and one I hadn't thought of before:

Setup Assistant is also great for restoring a backed up computer. The hard drive on my PowerBook G4 died, but thankfully I had done a full backup about a week before on an external FireWire drive. Upon receiving the PB with a new hard drive, I booted up with the external FW drive connected, used Setup Assistant to migrate from the 'Mac' that was on my external drive, and a few hours later, I had my PB back to the way it was before. Amazing!

So there you have it-Setup Assistant is a useful utility that couldn't be easier to use. If you still have any questions about it, you'll find a comprehensive FAQ at: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25773.

That's all he wrote…