So on this day where Apple might or might not have surpassed Microsoft as the biggest tech company on the planet, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the company to highlight a great experience, a mysterious failure, and a fabulous customer service save.
I was transferring the contents of my trusty Macbook Pro to another Macbook Pro using Apple’s Migration Assistant. Now I’ve tried the same maneuver with Microsoft Windows dozens of times, only to discover data would get lost on the way, preferences would get discarded, and of course no applications would make it over due to various Windows internals such as the registry, COM+ objects, and other Very Bad Design decisions. So I’ve basically conditioned myself to re-build Windows machines from scratch when I upgrade.
But Apple’s Migration Assistant has that fabulous MacOS feature of “it just works”. Settings, preferences, bookmarks, files, applications: everything just arrived on my new Mac exactly as they were on the original machine. With only one major exception: I couldn’t login to my new machine after it migrated. Ack! The old password which was clearly working on my old machine just wouldn’t work on the new machine.
It turns out this is due to FileVault. My workplace requires that we use FileVault to encrypt our home directories. Where previous versions of the Migration Assistant would ‘fess up that it couldn’t transfer encrypted files, the Snow Leopard version gamely tried. The result: epic fail.
I tried re-installing the OS from scratch, but found out that there are two ways to re-install Snow Leopard, and I had picked the “in-place” re-installation method which doesn’t touch your files. So I landed right back at the login screen where any password I tried would fail.
So I called Apple Support. Actually, they called me after I described my problem on their Website. Very cool. Two seconds after I hit Submit, my phone rang. Within 2 minutes, I was talking with Scott, who helpfully walked me through a few options. I chose the option of wiping out the partition on my new machine, re-installing the OS, and disabling FileVault on the old machine.
After disabling FileVault (the Mac took about 2 hours to decrypt about 100GB of data) and re-running the Migration Assistant, I was back in action. Several times during the day, I completely forgot I was working on my new machine: it was that seamless. (And yes, dear reader, I re-enabled FileVault on the new machine.)
So if you are ever in the same position and are nervous that Migration Assistant will leave stuff behind, have no fear. All the bits arrive in the right place, and it just works. (Note: you can transfer data by Firewire or Ethernet: Firewire took maybe 35 minutes to transfer about 100GB of files, whereas Ethernet took about 3 hours.)
So Apple: shame on you for not putting in a warning in Migration Assistant about not being able to transfer FileVault-encrypted Macs. But great save with the fantastic support experience of calling me and connecting me with the highly trained, patient, articulate, and polite Scott.
