Silly question from soon to be new mac guy.

I'm in the process of cleaing up my broken monitor windows latop in preperation of switching to a macbook around christmas. I'm currently backing up all my files, photos, and documents about 200 gigs worth to a external hard drive. Then I got to thinking is this even going to work? I think I remember reading something about having to format specifically to the apple platform, so if this is the case and I can't back up to my hard drive and then plug it into the mac and transfer, what would be the best option? I'm planning on back everything up to dvds, just didn't want to do it right now, but if I have to back up to dvd then upload to the mac I will. So any site will be very helpful. Thank you.

If you pay for the One to One service, the Apple Geniuses will do the data migration for you. If you want to do it yourself, you run the Migration Assistant on the Mac. You can hook up the two machines via either net, FW, USB, or wifi.
http://support.apple.c​om/kb/HT4796
http://support.apple.c​om/kb/HT4413

One thing I did before my migration....changed my email protocol from POP3 to IMAP. With IMAP all your email stays on the server (until you delete it) to be read via any of your computers, iPads, iPhones..etc. So when your new Mac logs into the email server for the first time....al your saved folders and inbox will be sitting there ready for use.

Best of luck with the migration!!!!!!!!

thanks for the info, i'm sorta dreading this process, but i'm probably just over thinking it

Your new Mac should have way more than 200 gb of free space. It's a bit of a hassle, but you could just copy all the files over to your Mac's hard drive temporarily (or permanently using Migration Assistant) and then reinitialize your external hard drive. Keep in mind, Apple's Disk Utility will reinitialize the drive in its current format (usually NTFS with most Windows volumes) unless you specifically set it to initialize as a Mac volume. You do this by clicking on the drive name in Disk Utility, not the volume name (which is below the drive name and indented). Once you click on the drive name, the Partition tab becomes available in Disk Utility and you can then set the number of partitions (probably one) and set it to GUID Partition table under Options and OS X volume, case insensitive and with journaling enabled. Post back if you have questions...

Chances are your external is formatted NTFS, which the Mac can read. I'd just connect the drive to your new Mac, drag and drop all your data into the Mac, then reformat the external and set it up for time machine.

Time machine is your BFF.

get a new external 2TB for $100 and use Time Machine on it (you are buying a mac so 100 aint gonna break the bank) Use your current external with all your data and go hide it at a friend/parent/family members house. There is your offsite backup.

crn3371 wrote in post #15330716
Chances are your external is formatted NTFS, which the Mac can read. I'd just connect the drive to your new Mac, drag and drop all your data into the Mac, then reformat the external and set it up for time machine.

+1. I just did this for my wife. Even copied her iTunes library straight over. Getting her email, contacts and calendar out of Outlook 2003 was a PITA, but everything else was fine.

If you have a Yahoo/ATT mail account and other Apple devices (iPhone or iPad), you might want to set up your mail account on the Mac as a POP. The OSX Mail client doesn't play nice with the Yahoo IMAP server, and you will probably find the server won't accept passwords fromm any of them at times.

Thanks guys again for tall the help. I'm not familiar with this "Time Machine" any chance it can help me go back to fix the Cubs? ok bad joke. I'll start googling thie "Time Machine" sounds helpful. I do have the iPHone so I'll see about linking all these up, I've read a little on this and it makes email a million times better from what I can see.

murtaugh, as a former Windows user who made the swtich to Mac, I can tell you it's worth it! My life is so much easier and better in an all-Apple world (iMac, Macbook, iPhone, iPad all working in harmony).

Good luck with the transfer!

I recently switched to Mac and have an issue sort of like the OP asks about. I have an external drive that I used with my PC which carried basically all of my old data. It's a Western Digital 1.5TB Passport or something. It took me a while to discover this, but I can't write to the drive with the Mac! The WD software says there is no writeable drive present, although the iMac can read it just fine. Looks like I have to reformat it for Mac, but in my case I can read everything into the iMac first.

So, there may be the kind of issue you mentioned.

I experienced that issue when I first bought my mac. Hard Drives are labeled as either being compatible with Mac or Windows or both. Make sure yours is compatible with Mac.

Since you were asking about back ups, if you want off site (iCloud) back up, Backblaze works for Macs. Carbonite, is windows only- unless they changed recently.

If you have Photoshop on the Windows machine don't forget to deactivate it before you get rid of the laptop. You may or may not be eligible for a platform switch depending on the version. At least that's what I've heard, since I've always been Mac I don't have any personal experience with that.

Just saying because I'm in the process of switching to a new Mac from a dead one and I'm going to have to deal with Adobe support to make the switch.

Harpo63 wrote in post #15337066
I experienced that issue when I first bought my mac. Hard Drives are labeled as either being compatible with Mac or Windows or both. Make sure yours is compatible with Mac.

All hard drives sold today are compatible with Macs. The issue is that they usually come initialized as NTFS volumes and can only be read by OS X, not written to. If you buy any of these drives you can reinitialize them as OS X volumes with Disk Utility.

Time Machine is native to OS X and works very well.

Thanks for the suggestions and input. I was actually at wally world this mornign and they had the Seagate Backup Plus hard drives and the box stated something about being NTFS and that they work for mac and windows with no reformating required. So does this mean they are plug and play so to speak and can go back and forth? Or I can transfer everything from windows to the mac, and then once everything is loaded on the make reinitialize is to be able to write to it instead of just reading from it? They also had the WD MyBook(or something like that) but the box stated you needed to reformat for mac.

Without commercial software, NTFS volumes are read-only on OS X Lion and Mountain Lion. If you buy such a drive you should reinitialize it as an OS X volume using Disk Utility (in the Application/Utilities folder) as I described above.