The Great Migration

I was originally planning on doing a single "catch up" post, but I decided to break it up a bit since it's all going to be pretty lengthy as it is.

So now that we've made the full scale jump into Appleland, it was time to migrate data and secure it. At this point, all of my data was scattered about on the Windows PC's attached drives, complete with questionable Windows backup files and recovered restorations. I took the primary attached drive and connected it to the USB port. Not surprisingly, the iMac recognized it immediately and mounted it. I thought I'd just grab my data at the top-most folder and simply drag it to my Documents folder and see how it played out. Not surprisingly, it did encounter an issue with one of the files. I'm not sure what kicked out the process, but a quick search on the error message introduced me to the "cp -R" console command. Using this command with a quick drag of the source and destination folders to the console window, I was then able to copy all the data files without any problem. I didn't time how long it took, but it didn't matter since I went to bed. So repeat this process for my 4 other drives, and I soon had all of my critical data on the iMac's internal hard drive.

The next item on the agenda was to get all of my email out of Microsoft Outlook 2007 and into Apple Mail. I had read online that this was no minor feat considering that even Microsoft Entourage for the Mac could not read Microsoft's own .pst files. Attempts to export/import using other mail apps like Mozilla Thunderbird produced spotty results, i.e. some messages converted fine while others did not with nothing to indicate why. I then came across a few posts about a product called O2M by a company called Little Machines (http://www.littlemachines.com). For $10, this little application was supposed to be the answer to all my email migration problems. I downloaded the application, which comes as crippleware until you register it, and proceeded to test its capabilities. The first thing I did was I opened Microsoft Outlook 2007, created a test folder, and copied 5 messages that Mozilla Thunderbird missed. Then I launched O2M's demo (which by no mere coincidence is limited to converting 5 messages) and pointed it at my test folder. I then imported the newly created mbox file into Apple Mail, and there were all 5 test messages. A few minutes later, Little Machines had my $10, and I was well on my way to converting all of my emails, contacts, and even my schedule appointments. This little application was truly a lifesaver since I was able to use it to convert all of my wife's emails, contacts, and schedule appointments as well.

I now have Apple Mail set up on the MacBooks and the iMac so that emails are left on the server until they are moved out of the Inbox. The iMac is the primary workstation, so if any emails are going to be saved, they'll be saved here where Time Machine will backup the data. Unfortunately, I cannot get Apple Mail to interact fully with Hotmail, which has been my primary mail account for the last 10 years. Unlike Gmail, Hotmail does not allow Apple Mail to access it using IMAP, and its POP3 configuration only allows it to read messages. Any deletions or message movements appear to work until you Get Mail, and then all those pesky messages show up again. So it may be time to say "Sayonara" to Hotmail and replace it with Gmail as my primary online mail address.

Now that I had all of my critical data on the iMac, it was time to protect it. With that in mind, I decided to buy an attached drive which would solely be used for Time Machine backups. To save you some reading, I'll break it down like this. I considered a Seagate 1.5TB FW400 drive, a WD 1TB MyBook FW400 drive, and a WD 1TB MyBook FW800. Again, I consulted my Apple buddy, and I ended up with the WD 1TB FW800 drive, which only cost me about $20 more than the FW400 version. While the 1.5TB would have been nice, I think the performance is a worthy trade off.

With drive in hand, I headed home, plugged it in, answered Time Machines questions regarding the drive, and sent it on its merry way to backing up my hard drive. It completed the entire initial backup of about 300GB of data in approximately 3 hours. FW800 ftw!

Now that I had Time Machine backups of this data, I was able to begin freeing up space on the attached drives, since I no longer required them as a backup.

All that remained now was to consolidate my non-essential files using the attached drives. Since these files tended to change quite frequently, I didn't want them clogging up my Time Machine backup, so I decided to keep them on the attached drives. After about a day of data file Tetris, I finally had things consolidated onto two 500GB drives. At one point, it was very tempting to simply go out and purchase a second WD 1TB Mybook, but I'm glad I didn't, since I have the storage already. It would be nice, though, if these drive enclosures had at least FW400.

The final piece to the hardware puzzle was getting my Canon MP960 multifunction connected and working on the iMac. I downloaded the printer and scanner drivers, and the MP Navigation and EZ-Print utilities from the Canon website, installed them, plugged in the MP960, and just like that, I was back in business. One thing that I was surprised to find was that using the scan function, I was able to save multiple scanned documents into a single multi-page PDF. In all honesty, this function may have been available in Windows, but I do not remember seeing it as an option when I scanned files previously, and it is a feature for which I had looked, too.

So here I am, fully migrated to the iMac, and so far everything is working beautifully. I was even able to open and read some Word 2007 documents in OpenOffice.org 3.0.1. Not too shabby.