Does Apple Transfer Files?

My friend is switching over from her windows pc to a macbook and i was wondering if she brings her old computer into apple will they transfer her music, documents, and other files to her new macbook? I'm fairly sure i've seen people do this at the genius bar before, but i'm not positive. If apple indeed does provide this service, does she need to make an appointment with the genius bar or can she just bring her computer the day she buys her mac book and have her files transfered then?

 

Yes, Apple will do this at a Retail Store with the service included in the purchase of a new Mac. Depending on where you are and how busy your local store is, you may or may not need to make an appointment.

However, if you know when you'll be at the Store, better to make an appointment than to not - and miss out!

Good luck!

--Tom

 

Depending on the size of the data you want transferred, you might have to leave your machine to get the transfer done. When I went from windows to mac, here is what I did. Bear in mind, my priority is email reading and office documents. I have no games.

1 - I purchased a network hard drive and set up a "shared" folder anybody could write to (yes, my home office was already wired for ethernet)
2 - I went to my windows machine and downloaded Syncback freeware and set it up to copy all the files I care about to the network drive nightly. Over the years, I have migrated all my files to "my documents" to make switching machines easier. On my Mac, I try to keep everything in "Documents" for the same reason.
3 - When it was time to switch over to my mac, I manually ran syncback one last time then switched off my windows box and put it in the basement
4 - I connected my mac and in finder I connected to the network drive using smb://networkdriveservername
5 - I copied all the files over to the new mac.
6 - I discovered I had left my address book and bookmarks on the old machine so I had to fire it up one last time, export addresses from thunderbird and bookmarks from firefox than copy those files to the network drive. I then imported my address book to address and bookmarks to safari

This is basically the procedure I would expect the Apple techs to follow. If you don't want to invest in a network drive, another option would be to (temporarily) share your "documents" folder on your mac and tell syncback on the pc to put everything there for you. I know the Apple guys will do this for you for free, but you could be without your machine overnight if you have more than a few gigs of files. In my case, I had close to 26 gig and they told me 48 hours. Going from Mac to Mac is a little easier. I have a firewire hard drive and can get from one mac to another in under 2 hours. Over gigabit ethernet, a "brain transplant" takes me about half a day. Over wifi or 100baseT ethernet, I wouldn't bother. To see how much work looms ahead of you, here are a few questions...

1 - is all your important stuff sitting in "my documents"?

2 - how big is your data? 1-3 gig, you might get "while you wait" service at the Apple store. 10+ gig and you might have to leave your machine overnight.

3 - do you use outlook/ie or thunderbird/firefox? (makes a difference on how to export your contacts/bookmarks)

If you are really worried it might be a good idea to burn everything in "c:\documents and settings\your userid" to dvd(s) so you can always get your back stuff you may have forgotten even after your pc is in a landfill.

hope this helps...

 

Why not just do it yourself? Enable file sharing on both computers. Connect both computers with a fire wire cable. Then just drag and drop whatever files you want over the network.

 

Most PC's don't have firewire, so that last post may not be an option.

As was said, they will transfer the data for you, but if you have a home network or external hard disk, it's probably better to do it yourself since you know where all of your files are...

The Geniuses at the Apple store, won't exactly know that, and you don't want a bunch of random crap you don't need copied over.

 

How reliable is Apple's copying service? If everything is nicely located in My Documents then it should be pretty easy for a person to do it themself. However, if files are all over the place or programs are saving stuff in their own Program Files folders, then I'd think even Apple will have trouble finding everything.

 

Really? Even my old Pentium 4 desktop that I got from a grocery store came with fire wire. If you don't have firewire, then you can either use an ethernet crossover cable or two regular ethernet cables in combination with a switch/hub/router.

 

You needn't bother with a firewire cable. A simple "crossover" ethernet cable should do the trick or put both machines on the network. Of course, if it's 100 base T or slower and if you have a lot of data it will be painful. I have had it take several hours to do a copy over 100 base T in my house and only 15 minutes over gigabit. I was so impressed I sold off all my old 100bT stuff at the garage sale this summer and everything is either gigabit or wireless. And when there's serious copying to be done, I shut down the wifi and use gigabit.

 

Thanks for all the feedback all. My friend picked up her macbook yesterday and they transferred all the files on the condition that we placed all her files on her old computer into one folder. They said that this service usually costs $150 if we the geniuses would have had to hunt and look for her files. The geniuses copied all the files to an external and then transferred them via firewire.