I have two MacBook Pro?｢どｨび｢s that I use for video editing. One of these computers is also my primary workstation with e-mail, calendars, contacts, PIM sync, etc., This computer is now in the caring hands of an Apple Genius as they work to repair a bad fan and top case assembly. No major problems, but enough minor problems to warrant a fix. I had been meaning to switch computers anyhow since the other computer was faster. Time to migrate data.
Typically a migration from one system to the next is a somewhat painful process. It?｢どｨび｢s possible to move the entire home directory on a Macintosh and get most of the files back in sync, but I had some issues with items in my library folder and didn?｢どｨび｢t want to move the corrupt items. ColorSync was all messed up, I had something eating away at the CPU and a bunch of legacy pref files were sitting in Application Support. I simply moved my music and movies folders over then left the Apple store for home... The problem is that I did not move any e-mail accounts, signatures, address book entries, etc. I thought I would have to wait a week to get this data back when I had a revelation... I own .Mac!
I opened my system prefs and hit the restore button. All of my IMAP based e-mail accounts were restored (IMAP is important since it was able to also restore all of my e-mail and sent items too right from the server.) With the accounts came all of my e-mail signatures, e-mail sorting rules and e-mail preferences. My address book was restored, all of my calendars were restored, my keychains were restored and my Safari bookmarks were restored. All in all the process took about 10 minutes and saved me from having to sort through my Library folder after waiting 5 days to get my original laptop back.
There are many other ways to get user information back, but in this specific case I was just happy that I had a .Mac family account. Hey, that?｢どｨび｢s three items I use it for now: iDisk, system restore and iCal sync for my Google Calendar/Treo 700wx.
