02/07/2008, 5:05pm, EST
Thursday, February 7th
Part I: First Look: MacBook Air Migration Assistant
Following our MacBook Air teardown, delivery/unboxing, accessory photos, benchmarks, and first impressions, MacNN has investigated the specialized Migration Assistant that ships with the MacBook Air.
To achieve ultimate mobility in its new MacBook Air, Apple was forced to re-evaluate which features are necessary in a notebook computer and which are expendable or replaceable. The result compromise is a striking, razor thin laptop with full sized keyboard but lacking an internal optical drive and many of the standard ports found on traditional laptops, such as Firewire or built-in Ethernet. These limitations make the process of migrating one’s existing user accounts on another Mac to the Air more challenging than with Apple’s other computers – a process usually accomplished via Firewire.
To accommodate the Air’s limited connectivity, Apple relies on a new version of its Migration Assistant to transfer account and data information. The Migration Assistant can transfer accounts wireless to other Macs through WiFi or by using the USB-to-Ethernet port adapter. The WiFi process could take upwards of 12 hours to complete; using the Ethernet connection should cut that time down to just a few hours.
Transferring Accounts: First Try
I attempted to transfer one of my existing user accounts from a PowerBook G4 to the new Air. Doing so requires installing the software containing the Remote Disc Application & Migration Assistant on the source computer. After inserting the CD into the PowerBook and running the installation package – a straightforward process that only takes a few minutes – the actual Migration Assistant program was nowhere to be found within my Utilities folder.
A quick check of the system requirements for migration revealed that the process requires Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or higher, whereas my PowerBook was still running 10.2 Jaguar. I was somewhat surprised that the installation process indicated that installation was successful, although in retrospect the installation wizard told me that it required zero bytes of space on the target disc to install, which should have been a hint.
Filed under: Apple, computers
Other story tags: MacBook Air, wireless, First Look, migration assistant
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If apple wanted the 'ultimate' in mobility, they wouldn't have included a USB port, monitor jack, or headphone port. And they would have made it smaller (say index card sized). And cut the weight a lot (say index card weight). Then you MIGHT achieve ultimate mobility.
Or you could change that first sentence to read "To achieve the best balance between mobility and features...."
so i tried it again. ran for about an hour... then hung at a 19 hour estimated time remaining. left it that way for another hour... no change.
tried it again. now i no longer had enough free space to run the full migration. apparently it was *saving* all the files in the failed migrations. not very cool. normally i would boot into FW disk mode and delete the file and try again. no such option with the Air. so i skipped running it again and created a new user and logged in.
from there i tried the Migration Assistant again. i tried a good 15-20 times to get it to run at this point. it would either not find the other machine or find it then hang at "Preparing" or the step after "Preparing" (looking for users or something like that). like hung hung... beach ball... had to force-quit out of it.
after doing that many many many times... eventually skipping wireless and trying on the ethernet network... no change. still lame. restarted both machines several times as well.
i finally got it to work by connecting the machines *directly* together via ethernet (no switch etc.) and running it that way.
that worked. gave some ridiculous estimates... 8 hours. 27 hours. 19 hours. 2 hours. etc etc. it was all finished in about 3 hours though.
so that was good. but half the applications were crapped out. converted to "Unix Executable Files" etc. icons missing. some other small problems. it got *most* everything though so this morning i manually recopied the applications that went bad (Adobe CS3 / Office 2004 and a couple others) and since their various other parts copied fine they all worked.
so now it is all fine. and working. i read the Ars Technica review this morning and they seemed to have a similar problem using Migration Assistant wirelessly. and anecdotally they suggest it hasn't worked for anyone.
so use a direct ethernet connection. a Time Machine backup on an external USB drive is actually probably the best bet as far as speed goes. so if you have that option... use it!