If you love something….
Set it free, right? Of course followed by you know what and in this case, well, let’s just say it hasn’t left just yet. What might I be rambling on about you ask? That would be my computer of the last 9 years or so, Old Mac. As you may recall we were hedging on getting a new one last week and after taking twice as long as it normally does to do the weekly update, plus getting a very loud and screeching feedback sound when I tried to listen to a song on the Bose external speakers, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered the new 24 inch iMac from Apple. Seems the new ones are extremely fit and light (as in skinny and easy to pick up) and actually come in a variety of colors (went with the yellow one, very cool). So yes, while I did love Old Mac, it was time to do the upgrade and say good bye. Or so I thought….
As I write this today, I now have two iMac’s on my desk (new and old) and I am still working on the mighty migration of old to new. You see and as it turns out, what should be fairly simple and relatively quick, was not the case at all. I suppose it is a bit my fault as I wasn’t completely paying attention to all of the details when I hit the “buy” button (I’ll get to that in a bit). Anyway, my new and very pretty 24” yellow iMac arrived this week and i went about un-boxing it, setting up the cords, plugging it in, etc, next to Old Mac so we could begin the transfer process. The last time we did this we were not aware that Mac had a built in “migration assistant” just for this purpose and ended up doing a lot of it via external drives and uploads if I am not mistaken, but I was ready for it this time and would not be making that mistake again. First up, turn on new computer. It has a welcome screen that begins to guide you through the steps, we are off and running! Next, on Old Mac, open up migration assistant, make sure that both computers are on the same network and begin the transfer, we are looking good.
About a half hour into it, new computer states “there is not enough storage space to complete the transfer”. Huh. That seems really weird as Old Mac is a 2013 model and New Mac is just that, shouldn’t be a care in the world and they always make the new versions better, correct? Tried it again, same results. One last time and no improvements so I called it a night. Next day, tried again, nothing. Time to call Apple. Tech Steve was very nice and helpful and we started running through the process. And then Steve looked up the New Mac stats, seems New Mac only has 256GB’s of storage. Old Mac had 1TB of storage. Old Mac had 260GB’s of stored data, New Mac said no way. Further conversations with Steve revealed that Apple and the new iMacs are all about speed, not so much about storing data. I might be wrong, but it may be that they cater more to gamers and streamers, of which, speed is very good. You can get the new iMac’s with more storage but that would require sending this one back and not quite ready to do that. So, my bad and I should have paid more attention to that, however, does anyone know of a manufacturer that strives to make product that is not equivalent or better than their older versions? I mean, c’mon, are you telling me it would have significantly increased the size of this thing with a little more storage chip in there? Me thinks not.
Carrying on from there, I had a look at what was taking up all of this “disk” space. Seems music, pictures and documents ere the leading culprits. But that got me thinking, I pretty much have all of those things stored in the “cloud” so why in the world are they taking up so much storage space? Seeing that the “photo’s” were weighing in at 70GB’s, figured I’d experiment and lose them from the transfer process (being in the “cloud” and all, should be able to get them right back, right? Hit the button and we were off and running. Transfer process underway (yay) and should be all done in a few hours.
I should mention that the computer for me is my photography lab, my recording studio and my video production facility. Old Mac had to go simply because he couldn’t keep up (not kidding when I say that it took almost 5 minutes just to get on the internet, like dial up). Photography and video’s are all directly involved with iPhoto’s (this is important to note). Anyway, once transfer finished up, needed to get a good idea of what we had. I hit the iPhoto icon and …..nothing there, as sort of expected. Let me just open up the old iCloud and pull them pics right back in. Won’t let me do that (not the first time or the 20th time, mind you, that I tried). Hum, what next. How about synching the phone where pretty much all of the pictures are and which has the same amount of storage space as New Mac, however, puts the dang photo’s in the Cloud so it doesn’t take up space!! Hold on, I think we are on to something, pictures start to appear on New Mac, yay again. Open up iMovie to see if I can access my photo’s/video’s, nothing. Only the actual iPhoto storage app can provide these. Huh again? Where are the ones I am looking at right on the screen? Unknown but I did stumble across a little note on the bottom of the page that mention my iCloud was not talking to New Mac at this point and I don’t even remember how I got there, but I did find a tool that specifically repairs the iCloud connection. And it worked! Back in business.
Amazing the amount of things you can figure out eventually if you try and pretty much exhaust all other resources. I know that sounds like a bit of a pain but I have always refused to let a computer get the best of me and I am still here so take that New Mac! I am sure we are going to get along just fine now and time to make, literally, some beautiful music together.
All for now, Ms. Zoe is screaming for something so gotta go (didn’t get a chance to spell check above, fingers crossed all is good). See you next week!
