The Mac Air is the first time in recent memory where I went to a computer with less. Less disk – less screen real estate, less plugs, and nicely – less weight.
Here are my notes.
My biggest problem was that my home directory was too large to fit on the new laptop’s hard drive – too much video editing, many copies of Sakai source code, etc.
My plan is to use both computers all the time with the Air being my portable computer and the MacBook Pro being my “Desktop” – the MBP will do video capture and editing and heavy development. Also the MBP will be the only one I run Parallels on to do PC stuff – mostly teaching tutorials and testing.
So the first thing is to expand the hard drive of the Air. I went out and bought two new disk drives. (1) A USB-powered SimpleTech 320GB Black Cherry (320 Juicy Dripping Gigabytes) for $140 at Best By and (2) a 500GB Maxstor full-size USB drive for $120 at Office Max – all on sale Saturday morning.
I am going to use the 320 GB bit to hold the less-accessed bits of my home directory and my development files – this way I can do development on either platform by moving a little disk back and forth.
On my old Mac Book Pro, I had been using TimeMachine all along to another 320GB USB drive. I needed to get my directory smaller. So first I make a copy of my entire /Users/csev directory onto the little USB drive with a simple drag/drop of the whole thing – folders and all.
Then I make a tar and gzip back up of my home directory to the new 500GB MaxStor – I tar first and then GZIP later when I have lots of time.
cd /Users
tar cf /Volumes/500GB/csev.tar csev
cd /Volumnes/500GB
gzip csev.tar
The tar was just an “emergency” second complete copy backup before I started whittling down my home directory.
Then I picked large parts of my home directory that were the new “stuff that will live only on USB” and then deleted them – using rm -r (trash looked like it would take days). I got my home directory down to about 30GB.
Then I plugged in the TimeMachine disk into the MBP and asked for a backup to start immediately (nice feature on the task bar that was recently added in an update).
Then I plugged in the TimeMachine Disk into my Air and ran the MigrationAssistant and restored it all. 30 GB took about 2 hours – but I had coffee and was busy formatting my family windows PC because of a hard disk crash so I was having fun.
By the way – I got wireless MigrationAssistant to start – it said it would take 18 hours and 41 minutes for 30GB – and then 30 minutes later – it still said 18 hours and 41 minutes – hence the us of the disk to do the transfer.
After MigrationAssistant finished the restore flawlessly, I fired things up and logged in on my newly migrated account on the Air – it was very nice. Desktop was fine – My dock looked just like the other computer – all was well – I connected the USB version of my home directory and compiled all of Sakai – flawless.
The only post-migration issue was that Mail wanted to reindex my inbox – this made me a bit nervous. It might be related to a rocky transition from 10.4 to 10.5 which I blame on how my home directory was set up.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/000381.html
But I went ahead and did it – the mail rebuild took about 20 minutes – and worked flawlessly. My iTunes and iPhone found each other as if nothing had changed.
All together – a very uneventful transition with a neat way to split my heavy duty bits of my home directory into the USB drive for easy transport back and forth between my “Laptop (Air)” and my “Portable Desktop (Mac Book Pro)”.
I moved my book folder to the middle of my desktop to remind myself to start writing now that I have a cool light laptop with a better battery.