Moving everything to a new Mac

[PeterBest]

I'm about to take delivery of a new MacBook, which will replace my dual G4. Should I use SuperDuper to copy files to the new machine? The drive in the new Mac will be half the size of the old drive, so I'll need to shrink my files, but I know from bitter experience that a straight copy, dragging selected folders across, mostly doesn't work the way it should. Any suggestions as to the best way to approach this?

[dnanian]

No, you definitely shouldn't. What I'd suggest is doing a backup to an external drive, then slimming things down as appropriate there. Then, during first boot, use the Migration Assistant to migrate from the FireWire drive to the MacBook.

[PeterBest]

Thank you very much for your help dnanian. My Mac help doesn't work - it stays blank and spins its little umbrella endlessly without coming up with anything, I have no idea why - and I'd never heard of the migration assistant, and could find nothing on the Mac forums because, presumably, I wasn't asking the question in the right format. SuperDuper to the rescue, even if it's just with advice.

[dnanian]

My pleasure, Peter. The Migration Assistant is quite useful, and is a great way to move to a new Mac -- it's really the only way when moving from PPC to Intel, too!