Mac OS X forum: time machine: old mac to new mac. how to?

The easiest way to do it is when you first take your new machine out of the box and turn it on.
If you have already done that, you will have noticed that it asked you if you had any data that you wanted to move from an Old Mac or a Time Machine Backup.
Having answered "Time Machine" you just connect the external hard drive to the new Mac and follow the instructions.
Once done, it takes a while, your new Mac will be just like the old one.
Items like iPhoto, iMovie & iTunes do not get moved BUT, their contents do, so all your movies, pictures and music will be there when you next launch those apps.
Unlike Windows, almost all of your applications will make the journey to the new machine without a problem, unless your MBP was an old version with a PPC processor, like a G4.

If you have already done the initial setup on your new machine, do as Bob suggested and run the Migration Assistant and follow the instructions that you get.

Let us knowhow you get on

P

I've done a fair number of Time Machine restores in my day, and have had little to no difficulty in getting everything back. By it's very nature, TM will backup your applications, user folder and data without a hitch. My advise is to use a backup drive AT LEAST twice the size of the drive you are making the backup from. That will allow for not only day-to-day backups but also for backups of those files that TM can't look inside to. Specifically iPhoto libraries, Entourage and Outlook mail databases, VM Fusion and Parallel virtual files as well. Probably other files as well I'm not familiar with.

What Time Machine WON'T back up is a Boot Camp partition. It will also ignore external hard drives unless you tell it otherwise. That will of course mandate a larger backup drive.

Using TM is fairly straight forward. Make sure your TM backup drive is formatted for GUID partition. You would do this in Disk Utility. Mountain Lion gets cranky if a TM backup drive uses the older formatting scheme for PowerPC Macs, and won't work at all with a Windows/DOS formatted drive.

When you go to restore from your TM drive using Mountain Lion, let it walk you through the first-time setup, and when it gets to the screen that asks if you want to restore from another disk, select it and then point to your TM backup drive. After it calculates how much data is going to be moved, click Continue and let it do its thing.

Hope this helps some.

Hi

If I were you I would use the Migration Assistant which is on your old mac and will be on the new one. It's far easier than Time Machine

Regards