A New Beginning

Finally, my work laptop is back in action.

After the little incident with its disk drive, I got a new spanking new SSD (a Samsung 840 Pro, praised be Corporate Purchasing), which is sure to eliminate hours of drudgery and increase my own lifespan accordingly.

For future reference, here are a few notes on how I migrated my stuff across over the past three evenings:

• Did a clean install of the OS on the new drive
• Set up a single admin account (as usual)
• Upgraded the OS to the latest version
• Set up full disk encryption with FileVault
• Downloaded all my purchases from the App Store¹, including iWork and Xcode (but didn’t setup iCloud on the admin account)
• Installed the Xcode command-line tools, Homebrew and a few essential command line tools
• Installed Java (yes, yes, I know, I know, but I need it²)
• Ran Migration Assistant to copy across only my personal account from another machine (no apps, no computer settings, no legacy junk)
• Enabled my own account to unlock FileVault

At this point, all my settings, accounts, personal scripts and non-Store apps (which I mostly keep in ~/Applications) are readily available, and there is zero crud from previous installations³.

Most “normal” users would have been done by now, but there was plenty more to do the next night. Sort of.

• Set up Dropbox (old and busted) and MEO Cloud (new hotness), which don’t require actually downloading anything (they only have to re-checksum the files that Migration Assistant copied across).

It bears noting that MEO Cloud soundly trounced Dropbox and was done re-syncing in seconds, while Dropbox kept churning (and wasting CPU) for hours, so I eventually gave up and left it overnight.

And yes, I have equivalent amounts of stuff (in both number and volume of files) in each, which I’ve been patiently migrating across in an organised fashion – given that MEO Cloud is available for all the platforms I use and now sports selective folder syncing (a must for my personal requirements), I’ll likely ditch Dropbox in a few months except for those few apps/services that only work with it.

Finally, last evening I:

• Set up a few things you can’t get from the App Store (Office 2011, MenuMeters, Mail Act-On, Parallels Desktop, Expandrive, Sublime Text, Light Table, my MacVim build, etc.). This actually took me a whole night, and is a testament to how stupendously useful the App Store really is.
• Ran easy_install to check all my Python packages are in order⁴
• Fired up Mail.app and started working as if nothing ever happened, but way faster than before.