Today is not about food, nutrition or cooking.

After a few years I have decided to replace my aging IMac, 2008 model, with a MacBook. Since I last did this little evolution, the state of the art in transferring files and programs was also found in Apple computers, with the migration assistant. I was expecting a couple of days at least in getting my system ready for the big migration.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of getting a new Apple computer, the process was roughly like this…you would spend a day cloning your computer’s boot hard drive. This takes a day because there is a lot of data on a full 500 gigabyte drive. I would usually get this started and go to bed. Next day, I am on to step 2. The first time you boot your new Mac, after it figures out what keyboard you are using and what language you are speaking, it asks you if you want to transfer from an old computer. You say yes, and it spends however long it takes to move all of you r music, photos, email, programs, and data from the old to the new. It always takes a while. You can do this process using the old computer itself, or you can use the clone you made the day before. If you use the clone you don’t lose the use of your old computer while this is going on. After rebooting your new computer with all of your old data on it. At this point, about two days from when you started, you are safely into your new computer. Sometimes things don’t go right, but usually that is just how it happens.

Yesterday I got home and it asked me if I wanted to transfer from an old machine, and I declined. Next it asked me if I already have an apple id, and I do. I told it I have separate id’s for the Apple Store and the iCloud. I put all those credentials in. iCloud told me that it had sent invitations to all of my other machines, and if I have access to them, I can use one of them to let this new machine into my iCloud. I went to one of them and discovered that the popup on it could not be dismissed so that I could get to my password manager program to see my iCloud password.  Uh Oh. Same for my iPad, couldn’t get to 1Password. Went to my old computer and I could get to 1Password, put in my iCloud credentials and voila, my new computer had access to all of my iCloud data. In my case that meant Safari had all of my favorites and website passwords already in it, which included Facebook. Facebook also sent me a text code so that it knew the new device logging in was me. Now Facebook was all set up. Went to the Apple App Store and saw a list of every program that I have bought for either me or Karen’s computers since the App Store was born. I started installing apps from my old system that I wanted on my new system. That was not every app, mind you, so I wasn’t taking up valuable hard drive room on programs I no longer need, that I would just have to take off later. Advantage new way. After installing 1Password on the new system I opened it up and it let me know it saw my passwords all stored on the cloud, did I want to log in and use that file? Yes. Now 1Password was set up. I pointed iPhoto to my photo library (69 Gigabytes small) on my TimeCapsule, and now iPhoto was set up. I logged into my account on iTunes, turned on iTunes match and now all of my music was accessible on the cloud. No wasted duplicated data on my computer. So far I have spent about two hours on this job.

The next morning I installed and updated Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. I had to have an external DVD for this job, because Office wasn’t available to me on the cloud when I bought it. I guess if you have Office 365, this would be pretty easy these days, but this was the hardest part of my job so far. I had to find the key that you punch in, which, fortunately was right at hand. Office updated itself and restarted four times before it said it was up to date.

All in all, I am out three hours of time to get my old computer, that was taking up about 400 Gigabytes of a 500 Gigabyte drive onto my new computer, where it is now taking up about fifty Gigabytes. I was amazed and tickled. The cloud is the shit! I have never been so sold on the idea of it until today. I have no idea if the PC people are having this kind of experience, would love to hear about it if you have any experience with this process. For my part, I have always been high on Apple, I have owned one PC, ever. I have Windows on a partition on an external drive that I can boot into with my Mac, but I never do. If you need a new computer you owe it to yourself and your family to give the Apple computers a long hard look. They have tons of material on the Apple website about how to easily convert your life from PC to Mac. I can’t say how easy or hard that is, but I bet it’s about as easy as what I just went through for the last three hours.

Tomorrow, more about my normal discussion matter, hope you didn’t mind today’s detour.