Hello,

Ive been using macs since 2001 so I should know how to do this but i dont =).

got the new 27" imac and i have to transfer lots a data (itunes, photos, work stuff) from my macbook pro 2008 year to my new imac.

I thought about the firewire cable but heard that there is a million different ones.
I also have an external drive 2T size but its been used for timemachine and I dont want to risk the data getting corrupted.

I was told you can just transfer via network. ?
How?

Thankyou for any input.

br,
Mike

 

Your new Mac when you boot it should ask you if you want to transfer from another Mac via firewire or from a Time Machine backup. I would do a current backup to TimeMachine and then have the new one pull everything from there.

If you are still paranoid about losing that data, then doing the transfer via Firewire should work as well. You need to see which firewire ports you have (whether Firewire 400 or 800) so you can get the correct cable. It will walk you step by step through the process.

 

Like gobbles stated, You can load from a time machine backup. Hookup the old time machine drive to the new mac, then choose that option and it will load the last back up onto the new mac. The data will only be copied onto the new mac, no writing on the external drive

 

Time Machine is not inherently any "safer" for transferring data-- in fact it takes quite a lot longer as it has to index everything.

You already have a utility to do this. It's called Migration Assistant in Applications -> Utilities.

As for FireWire, there are two types, 400 and 800. The only ones you'd use on a Mac would be the six-pin FW400 cable, or the nine-pin FW800 cable. The small 4-pin unpowered plug is a horrible bastardization from the PC world.

You can use firewire, ethernet, USB, just about anything you like.

 

thanks guys for the input.
Going to go for the firewire