[P1] Moving the whole thing

[Brian Pearce]

>  4. Finally, some of the reviews of ccc say that to work properly, the 
> system on the iBook to be cloned needs to be built from the install 
> disks. This is the current point of confusion I am trying to 
> understand, since I want to save all the software, data, preferences, 
> email, bookmarks, etc. I have on the iBook and want to use all this 
> same stuff on the iMac. Being able to easily synchronize the two on an 
> ongoing basis would be a godsend, but I will happily settle for just 
> getting that system moved onto this box.

Initially, I was not a big fan of the enforced directory structure 
(Applications Folders, Users Folders and what not) that was forced upon 
me by OS X, but I've learned to live with it, and I can even begin to 
see the advantages when it comes to transferring the contents of a 
drive or backing up. (In this case, all the "data, preferences, email, 
bookmarks, etc" should be in the Users' folder, which should be easy 
enough to copy manually.)

I set up a secondary user on my iMac devoted to backing up my iBook; 
when I switch to that user, I have a virtual mirror of my iBook 
(depending, of course, on when the files were last backed up).

But with OS X, aren't we mostly past the point where we should even 
*need* to write an exact duplicate of an older drive to transfer files 
to a newer one? Is there any compelling reason to copy older System 
files over to a new computer?

BRIAN/bpearce at cloud9.net