[slcullen]

Good afternoon Dave. First many thanks for fixing my user name. The fourms have been great help. But I'm a bit nervous about using SD restore.
Background: my 3.5 year old Imac G5 desktop died last week and trouble shooting said it was the logic board. Apple support confirmed. So its SD to the rescue. I have been doing a sand box back up every Friday evening since I got SD, to an Iomega external drive, with nightly backups to a flash drive of my data folder (mainly Quicken data and Excel speadsheets, and a couple of others, FWIW). Now that the new Imac has arrived I'm going to use the back up drive to get the files off it into the new computer and be back in business, thanks to SD.

I've read a goodly number of posts and your replies, but most seem to be either restoring data after a crash back onto the "crashed" computer, or getting data onto a Macbook. Which is the better course, migrate or restore. And the dead Imac was prior to the Intel chip, which the new Imac has, BTW. AND....can I get the data off the external drive without SD being installed on the new Imac? Haven't unpaced the new one yet, so I'm not in trouble. Yet!

Thanks again, Spencer