Transfering Applications from Mac-Mac
 

I've had a Mac Book for a long time, and it's crapping out. My employer got me a refurbished Mac Book with more capability (and now I can put Mavericks, etc on it and have.)

My question is this...is there any way I can transfer my 2008 Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PP, and Entourage) from the old one to the new? I tried using bluetooth and seemed to do it but when I tried to open it got an error message.

Any help in doing this is greatly appreciated.

How did you transfer it via Bluetooth?

You should be able to just straight copy a few folders, like via a USB stick or external HDD.

Off the top of my head, you should copy the app folders from:

/Applications/ <--- this is the actual application
~/Library/Preferences/ <--- these are your app specific prefs
~/Library/Saved Application State/ <--- this stores saved runtime state, might not be necessary

Those are really all you need. There's no God awful registry like Windows so not much else to do there.

Depends on if Mavericks even allows it.

I had 4 or 5 apps (Photoshop CS, CIV III, etc) it told me would not work in Mavericks when I was getting ready to upgrade.

Might not be able to.

Might have to save them as a disk image or DMG then open it on the new laptop.

This is true. Some apps aren't universally compatible.

That's really just packaging though. You could do it as a ZIP as well, they're processed essentially the same way.

sometimes you need to compress the file, then xfer that to the new puter. to do this, first copy the file to a new folder, then compress.

also, you need to be sure all the files in you apps list are included. typically, the icon is the whole app, but some apps hold a folder as well.

and there are times I used terminal to get this done. large files can be done this way. terminal has always been the most reliable way of xfer for me because it will build the new directories exactly.

QFT

I believe the switch is -R (recursive)

You guys are going about this all wrong. OS X has an app called Migration Assistant that is designed to do exactly what you're wanting here. You can find it in Applications\Utilities. You hook up one machine to the other and migrate Applications/Entire Accounts/Files/Settings/etc. from the old machine to the new. It's the easiest thing in the world compared to other OSes.

The only issue is how to go about connecting the two computers together, because there are several different methods to go about it. If you have firewire on both machines and have a firewire cable, this would be the easiest and fastest method by far. Simply boot the old one into Firewire mode by holding down the T key at startup, connect it to the new one, and run Migration Assistant. If you don't have firewire ports or cables, you can also do this across the network. Connect both to the same network, run migration assistant on the new one and follow the instructions.

This page will pretty much tell you everything you need to know: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4413

Let me know if you have any questions....

FYI... if you simply wanted to move Office and nothing else, you could technically do this. But you're leaving out some stuff needed for it to work.

Essentially, you can go to this page, and for each step instead of removing you'd just copy the item to the same place on the new system.

For Office 2011: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2398768
For Office 2008: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2500821

But that said, if you do it that way, you're very likely going to create some permissions issues. So at the very least you should run a permissions repair once you've moved everything. It would work though.

Yeah, DUH.

I'm an idiot.

Yeah, for most applications, what I said would work (repairing permissions not withstanding, GOOD POINT btw).

But Office is a Microsoft app. It only stands to reason that it takes OSX's simplicity and ****s it all up. :D

good post.

I use command K to get all my puters talking to each other. I often handle files of 4gb or larger going to disk BU, and I had a hard time getting xfers that large across until I looked at some info on the net that spoke on FAT32 difficulties and how to get around this using terminal.

yep :D

FAT32 filesystems can't support individual files over 4GiB. Doesn't have anything to do with the file transfer.

I use a ton of FAT32 drives to archive because they are much less expensive and I do xfer files larger than 4gb all the time. you can't simply drag files into a FAT32 drive, but you can use ditto -av command in terminal to get around it.

First of all, magnetic drives themselves don't have a specific filesystem.

A FAT32 drive can be reformatted to NTFS, EXT3/4, XFS, or whatever hell else you want.

A pre-formatted Seagate with NTFS isn't anymore expensive than a Seagate pre-formatted with FAT32.

If you're talking about solid state stuff like USB thumb drives, you shouldn't be formatting them FAT32, you should be formatting them EXFAT, if you're using them with Windows, because it's far more efficient at keeping the drive alive.

Finally, FAT32 cannot store files larger than 4GiB. It is mathematically impossible.

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GiB minus 1 byte or 4,294,967,295 (232 − 1) bytes. This limit is a consequence of the file length entry in the directory table and would also affect huge FAT16 partitions with a sufficient sector size.[1] Video applications, DVD images, large databases, and some other software easily exceed this limit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Al...on_Table#FAT32

dude, this a mac/unix thread. you're talking windows/dos.

FAT stands for "File Allocation Table".

That table is an index that exists in the filesystem itself, regardless of whether you mount it in Windows, Unix, OS X, or anywhere else. All operating systems use FAT32 in exactly the same way. Pointers to files and folders are stored in clusters and those clusters are indexed in the file allocation table.

The file and directory length entries in the index have a limited size and therefore the index cannot accommodate files larger than 4GiB.

You cannot write files larger than 4GiB to a FAT32 filesystem on Windows, OSX, Linux, or any other operating system. It's a limitation of the filesystem itself.

Here's a thread from a person who swore their Lacie external HDD, formatted FAT32, could store a 30GB virtual machine image.

The problem is that a VM image is not a "file", it's actually a folder or bundle.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=477728

hmm, well, I recall figuring a way through terminal to get larger files copied to drive without reformatting. I have somebody else doing this now, but I'll look for my notes on it.

Well, you did say you were "archiving" or doing backups, right?

It's entirely possible that your archive looks like a file but is actually a bundle of files in a wrapper. I'm guessing that's the case. Similar to the guy on that Mac rumors post.

At any rate, it doesn't really matter. I'm not trying to bust your chops or anything. Just making sure the information is out there.

You shouldn't be using FAT32, it's gross. :D

Can't you use a time machine backup and restore?

You can but there are things to consider. I backup to NAS for everything. The way time machine works the preset size limit of the sparse bundle is equal to the size of the volume. So Time Machine will eventually fill up whatever drive you put it on. Not a big deal for a single purpose drive but absolutely sucks if you use a NAS, have multiple user directories on the drive, or use the drive to store media or other files.

There's a ton of tweaks you can do but in the end I opted for a FireWire 800 enclosure and a 200GB drive. Trying to backup directly to NAS and limit the size of the sparsebundle was just too problematic. It got over 400GB at one point. Now I run Time Machine on the local FireWire drive and then make an image of the entire disk once a month and copy it to NAS.