Best practices for setting up a replacement computer? (Replacing a duplicacy backed up computer?)

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#1

I just purchased two replacement computers. One is a new Windows 10 machine (Surface Laptop 4) and the other is a Macbook Air (M1).
They will replace my wife and my old Macbook Air machines.
So in my case, I am migrating from OS-X to Windows 10.
And my wife is staying on OS-X.

Should we:
a) Set up Duplicacy on each machine and perform a restore of all our files from our remote Internet B2 Backblaze backup?
b) Manually move the files to the new machines over out home network (by cut and paste), and then install Duplicacy and try to continue / sync the backups to the new machines?
c) Manually move the files to the new machines over our home network (by cut and paste), and start completely new backups with Duplicacy. Once we are confident in the new machines we could delete the old backups from the old machines.
d) Some other process?

Also, for the “cross platform move” from OS-X to Windows, any tips on having that go smoothly depending on the method chosen?

Thank you!

#2

I would go with option b. Local migration likely will be faster than round trip from backup provider (in case of Mac to Mac migration just migrate using migration assistant over thunderbolt or usb cable — then you won’t need to do anything else, you will continues as if nothing happened pretty much). Furthermore, I’d assume you would want to preserve your data layout and hence the backup history would continue naturally.

I would not start new backup because you want to preserve backup history and it is much easier to have it under one backup id.

For the tips on smooth migration from macOS to windows — the best tip I can give is not to. Otherwise you will lose some data inevitably — apps configuration may be different, keychains are not compatible, etc etc, and degrade user experience (because windows…. Can’t stand it. Well, it’s subjective of course)

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#3

For the tips on smooth migration from macOS to windows — the best tip I can give is not to. Otherwise you will lose some data inevitably — apps configuration may be different, keychains are not compatible, etc etc, and degrade user experience (because windows…. Can’t stand it. Well, it’s subjective of course)

I only backup actual user folders containing files. Not app settings or the like. No system files. So hopefully naming the folders the same will facilitate the transition.
(off topic: While we use mac hardware, we don’t use any mac specific software except the OS. In fact, my desktop machine is windows and my laptop has been mac with constant interchange between each since 2013. I’m not really a fan of all the constraints of apple products, and many hardware things I end up using often require a windows environment. Regardless, suggesting I get a different computer isn’t particularly useful.)

Anyone else agree/disagree on option b? Any tips, especially cross platform?

#4

Yes, then it will be fine. For example, most of my data is in OneDrive and iCloud drive; in the corresponding folders under user home at each respective OS (/Users/me and c:\Users\me); therefore if duplicacy repository root is your home the transition will be absolutely seamless – folder locations won’t need to change.

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#5

Option b is undoubtedly the best. :wink:

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#6

A quick follow up.
For the mac, I ended up using apple’s “Migration Assistant”. That magically moved EVERYTHING over from the old mac, and Duplicacy came right up. Using “Migration Assistant” might not be advisable if you are looking to start over without all your old apps etc, but if you want to duplicate your old mac it worked fine.
I would suggest disabling Duplicacy on the old machine first before the migration, just to avoid an confusion.

For the windows machine… well, I ended up not liking that hardware as much as I expected, and I returned it and bought another mac.

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#7

Actually the magic goes far beyond copying everything – as in it does not copy everything; it copies everything that’s important – for example, /Library/Caches, derivative Photo Library data, Spotlight indexes, mail indexes, etc are ignored. That’s why when you open say Mail after migration – it takes some time to re-index mail. Same true about photos.

So, if you have well-behaved application – that store configuration, caches, and temp files in the correct locations – migration assistant will do the right thing for that app – discarding accumulated garbage but preserving user configuration. This is one of the reasons I’m trying to get Duplicacy to be a good macOS citizen – not dump everything into ~/.duplicacy_web, but put stuff in the correct places – ~/Library/Logs, ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/Duplicacy, etc. Fortunately, duplicacy_web allows to configure (most of) it, but unfortunately it is not a default (yet; hopefully)

:smiley_cat: This makes me excited and disappointed at the same time… Nothing against windows per se – everyone benefits from a healthy competition – but realistically speaking they are a bit lost at the moment… maybe due to lack of vertical integration, maybe because of the resources needed to keep supporting ancient features and bugs taking their toll, but for me at least – windows seems way too restrictive, awkward, buggy, to the point of being unusable; Fedora/Debian are getting there, but cannot yet be recommended as a general purpose compute device for most people, and only in macOS I can do whatever I want unrestricted, without the need to fight hardware and software, and with usability that my spoiled brain grew to expect. (this comes from years of experience developing on windows, macOS and using and managing linux) /offtopic

#8

Good advice. This is applicable to everything else too, not just duplicacy. Myself – I just turn off networking on the source Mac before migrating. Then wait a week to make sure all is good with a new one – and then erase the old.