Aibimac-maintenance-log

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I got this imac for Andrea in 2007 and it has been her computer since then. With several OS upgrades over time, the old Core 2 Duo processor with 2GB max memory just was not hacking it, so I replaced it with a new iMac with a quad core Core i5 and 8GB of memory.

Transferring the old system

Pretty easy. I put both machines side by side on the same wifi network and started the Migration Assistant app on the old one. Meanwhile the new one is looking for a source to migrate from. It turned out that it could not migrate directly from the old computer because the OS was not up to date. Bad choice, Apple. Fortunately, I kept a Time Machine backup running all the time on the old machine, so all I had to do is unplug the time machine backup drive from the old one and plug it into the new one. It took an hour or so to "recover" into the new machine.

Glitches

Of course, not everything was perfect.

• The new iPhoto was not compatible with the old one's database, so I actually had to download and install a program to fix it. Another bad Apple decision. This should have been built into the new iPhoto.
• Something is still wrong with Google Drive. It says it can't sync because it can't find the drive folder. Not a big deal and I will just reinstall it later.
• Mail had to do some stuff before it was ready to use, but this was built into the tool, so not a big deal, except it seems to have created at least new versions of a lot of files.
• CrashPlan backup was really confused because it did not know the difference between the two computers. I tried renaming the old one to ejbmac, but that had the effect of renaming both of them. Literally, from the point of view of CrashPlan, they were the same machine. After fiddling with it for a while, I decided to go to the source for information, and a google search quickly revealed the solution. Each computer registered with CrashPlan has a unique identifier that is automatically assigned when the software is installed. Since the new installation came from backups, it was not really an installation, so it did not get a new ID. Fortunately, there is an easy, though arcane, solution. Within the CrashPlan application, if you double click the CrashPlan house icon in the upper right corner of the window, a command line interface comes up. There is a command "guid" that changes the "global unique identifier" for the current computer. Without arguments, it shows the current identifier. If you type "guid new" then a new id is generated. I did this with the old machine, and it gave me the option of adopting an existing machine, which I did not want to do, so I specified that it should be treated as a new computer, ejbimac. I did the "guid new" thing with the new machine, and it just assigned a new id and let me identify it as Andrea Burdick's Computer, which was already registered with the system. I changed the backup set to only back up Andrea's account and then change the new one to only back up my account. By the next morning, all of the backups were up to date.