PC > Mac Migration Advice?

[Midpack]

After nothing but MS-DOS/WinPC’s since Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, I have an iMac coming in a few weeks.

I’ve looked online quite a bit, mostly YouTube, but I haven’t found much detail and most of the guidance seems to be geared for wholesale migration from PC to Mac understandably.

I want to continue to use my 5GB of free iCloud for (iPad/iPhone) established calendar, contacts, reminders, messages, notes and a couple select doc files on the iMac. I also plan to use Mac Mail for my three email accounts (same as my iPad, iPhone).

However, we also have a Microsoft 365 subscription which includes 2-6TB of OneDrive cloud storage, and I might as well use it - so I want to store/backup almost everything else there - all “My Documents” there including Music, Books, Photos, etc. (vs adding paid iCloud). I do have two Win subfolders with all our sensitive financial/personal files and our TurboTax files, I don’t want that in the cloud. I’ll back that up locally.

I’m aware of Apple’s Migration Assistant, but I haven’t used it yet and haven't seen a detailed 'test drive' video, and I suspect they make it easy to migrate everything – not where I want to end up. Hopefully I can setup my new iMac, then setup iCloud to handle contacts, reminders, messages, notes etc. and finally migrate what’s left in My Documents (mostly XLS,DOC,PPT files), Music, Books, Photos from my PC to the iMac. I assume Migration Assistant will allow me to pick and choose which folders/subfolders and not do a wholesale transfer of all docs? I'm still unclear what Mac file structure looks like, but I guess I'll learn.

It occurs to me I could selectively put all My Docs, photos, music etc. on OneDrive now, and sync with my iMac, avoiding Migration Assistant altogether (but Mac file structure)?

Hopefully this will all be more intuitive when I finally see it all, but I don’t want to find myself up to my ears ‘lost in migration.’ Sorry if I am making this more complicated than it will actually be. TIA

 

[GalaxyBoy]

It’s been a few years so I don’t really remember much except it was easy. Relax, don’t worry…

Have you seen this https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204087 ? Should be helpful.

If you plan on creating a bootcamp partition for Windows on the Mac my experience was to make it bigger than you think you need. But then I deleted it altogether after a couple of years because I never used it.

Good luck! You’ll really like it I’m sure.

 

[Whisper66]

Fwiw - before migration, I made sure I had a backup of everything on an external drive. Then I just let the mac migrate everything it wanted to. I wanted to see how I liked the mac environment with no windows products used at all anymore. I liked it and never felt the need for reverting back. Still have the backup drive but haven’t touched it in years. Good luck on your migration.

 

[Ready]

I never attempted any migration. Macs have no problem reading Windows files. I would just build the Mac with the applications you want to run and then open your Windows files and you will be pretty much done. You may have a few extra steps to install printer/fax/scanner applications and any other third party devices you want to access, but that’s fairly simple too.

 

[ncbill]

I don't use Bootcamp to run Windows on my Mac...I use Parallels to run a W10 virtual machine (annual subscription)

There are free virtualization solutions out there to do the same.

 

[eytonxav]

The only issue I had was migrating my mail over to Apple Mail and not lose all the attachments in my mail messages. Had to use a conversion software by Little Machines to accomplish the mail transfer. This was back in 2013, so not sure if Apple has come up with an easier way to accomplish that. All other MS files were no problem.

 

[WestUniversity]

PC > Mac Migration Advice?

Once it’s all said and done I think you’ll be really pleased. I don’t miss PC’s or Microsoft or their bloatware one bit. I did my migration too many years ago to be of much help in that regard but wanted to offer encouragement just the same…