Published by marco on
Say you’re excited about having finally upgraded from OS X Tiger to Leopard more than two years after everyone else has already made the switch. Let’s say you’re not so excited that you completely lose your head and do a clean install without making a backup, but excited enough to forget that several Apple applications have rather convenient backup features baked right into them.
OS X offers a Migration Assistant with which you can migrate settings from another OS X installation or a Time Machine backup. However, it doesn’t see a SilverKeeper backup (a one-to-one copy of all files) as a valid OS X installation, so you can’t restore settings from that kind of a backup with this assistant.
It’s not the end of the world, though. Unlike Windows applications, which use installers to place entries in the registry and put files into the appropriate places, OS X applications are generally a drag & drop installation. So that’s the application itself, but what if you wanted to restore the preferences and user data that you so painstakingly configured and created in your old installation? It turns out that that’s not so hard either, once you know where things are.
OS X applications only create files within your user folder[1]—and only your user folder—and then in at most three folders:
Some Apple applications don’t stick exactly to this structure (e.g. Stickies, Safari, Mail, etc.), but third party applications are generally very good about this. One system-wide file you might want to copy is the ~/Keychain
folder, which kept track of all of your passwords (dozens of which you’ve probably completely forgotten by now). For all other application-specific data, see the list below for tips.
com.apple.mail
[2]. Copy the ~/Mail
folder to your new user folder and you’re done. The ~/Mail Downloads
folder seems to be some sort of cache and isn’t 100% necessary, but shouldn’t hurt either. When you start Mail in OS X Leopard, it will notify you that it is upgrading your mail store and voila! You’ve got mail.~/Music/iTunes
. If you use the default settings, letting iTunes keep track of the music data, it suffices to copy this folder; if you have music stored elsewhere, it’s up to you to make sure the OS X Leopard iTunes knows where those files are.~/Library
, instead using the ~/Pictures/iPhoto
folder. Just copy this over and you’ve got your pictures back.~/Safari
and your cookies are in ~/Cookies
, should you wish to rescue them.~/openvpn
instead of the Preferences folder. (This is most likely a requirement of the Unix-based OpenVPN subsystem.)~/Spelling
~/StickiesDatabase
file over and you’ll have your notes back.As with the address book, the best solution is to use the internal backup available from the File menu in the application itself. Whereas under Tiger, iCal actually stored its data in the ~/Application Support
folder, in Leopard, its data has moved to ~/Calendars
. Simply copying the folders over isn’t going to work here, unfortunately; it’s a bit more complicated than that. Here’s a rough guide:
~/Application Support/iCal/Sources
folder; there, you will see one folder for each of your calendars, though with very cryptic-looking names.In order to tell which calendar is which, open a cryptically-named folder and quick-view the Info.plist
file (press Space when the file is selected in the Finder); you should something like the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Key</key>
<string>3BFD9C8E-88A4-4EEF-A8E2-0AC4E153E53F</string>
<key>Title</key>
<string>Work</string>
<key>Type</key>
<string>com.apple.ical.sources.naivereadwrite</string>
</dict>
</plist>
The contents of the string
element (highlighted above) immediately after the key
element with the contents “Title” is the name of the calendar. If you were subscribed to calendars, then you don’t need to import those; you can just re-add the subscription URL to iCal directly.
.ics
from the folder containing the calendar you wish to import.~/Preferences
folder. They all include their application name somewhere in either the folder or file name.↩