I happen to get a new Macbook Pro this week at work, replacing my couple-year old one. Upon booting it up for the first time it offered me several choices to migrate my data. I chose the Firewire option and plugged my two computers together. After a couple hours of crunching I was delighted to find out that everything (applications, documents, user data) seems to have been migrated over to the new machine. I even had my existing browser history and cookies, my customized BASH profile, etc. It was like a brain transplant from one computer to another but without copying a disk image. There were only two gotchas:
- Certificates that enable wifi at work were not migrated
- Safari 4 was not migrated (I was left with Safari 3.2.1 on the new box)
I only realized the latter when I noticed that some SMIL animation had stopped working in Safari 😉