My wife’s work computer is a MacBook Pro that the IT staff is going to replace tomorrow. They say they’re going to transfer all her data (and most of it is on the cloud, anyway), but I want to do a separate backup just to be sure.
I’ve used PCs since before the days of DOS, but I’ve never owned or used an Apple system, only occasionally helped my wife with hers.
My question is. if I have copied all the files in her Documents, Downloads, and Desktop folders to a thumb drive, have I got all of her local data? Or could something be hidden somewhere else?
She is not a power user. She has not intentionally moved or stored anything on locations other than the defaults. But Windows/PC apps sometimes store files in their own default locations that wouldn’t necessarily be in the corresponding directories.
I get the impression that Apple doesn’t do that, but I’d just like confirmation that I have all her data before she goes to work tomorrow morning.
I’d like your replies by about 10 pm EDT tonight before we go to bed. (Sorry for the short notice.) Thanks!
Every macOS user account has a hidden ~/Library directory, and many applications save important bits in subdirectories there - Mail for instance! … best bet would be to copy the entire user directory - if it’s a work machine, the standard Music, Movies and Photos subdirectories aren’t likely to be as huge as they would be on a home machine. As soon as you start picking and choosing bits, you risk missing something, not to mention wear and tear on the brain cells.
Download either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, both of which are shareware and both of which give you full functionality for a trial period, and both of which will made an absolutely compete copy of your entire hard drive, bootable, invisible files and settings and everything included.
(you can also deliberately NOT copy files or folders that you know are not of interest)
I’m a Carbon Copy Cloner user myself, but the other product is also well-regarded.
Thanks, @vbob. Remembering that I know nothing about Apple, please explain how I’d find and copy the User directory. Using Finder, I only saw the folders I mentioned, and others that were irrelevant.
@AHunter3, thanks but because it’s a work computer, we don’t have authority to install new software.
Which makes me wonder, @vbob, can I access the User directory without admin rights?
You can access the specific user subfolder within Users, and you can access Users generically, you just can’t open and browse other (different) users’ folders (they won’t open).
For example if it were you and commasense was your MacOS account name,
/Users/commasense
would be accessible to you and you can copy its contents; or you can go up to
/Users
…and see commasense from the outside, letting you grab and drag-and-drop it to an external volume to copy it all.
Just in case this isn’t obvious (it wasn’t to me when I started using MacOS), you can get to any named folder in the Finder by selecting Go → Go To Folder.
This was a big help. Thanks. I hadn’t seen the Go option. Apple’s practice of putting the menu for the active program at the top of the whole screen, instead of at the top of the program’s window, as in Windows, often confuses me.
Thanks all, for the suggestions. As it happens, there was nothing in any of the media folders, and only one relatively unimportant file in the root user directory that I hadn’t copied. But your advice allowed me to be confident that I’ve copied everything important.