Q In planning my migration from an old MacBook to a new Mac, am I right to suppose that Ethernet is the best way to connect the systems? I have a drawer full of Cat 5 cables; would one of those suffice? Will the new OS X be able to tell which apps will work, and which to put aside for upgrading?

A You can get the Migration Assistant to move existing documents, apps, and more from an old Mac to a new one either when you first set the new system up, or later, although the former is usually easier.

Most means of connecting the two for file sharing, including networking, particularly cabled Ethernet, FireWire or Thunderbolt ‘target’ drive use, or an external drive are good. The faster the rate of file transfer across the connection, the shorter time migration will take, and wireless networking can be so slow as to appear endless (or hang).

Although very old PowerPC-only apps are marked out as incompatible when migrating to all recent Intel-based Macs, no release of OS X can tell whether every app is compatible. Sometimes quite old apps work surprisingly well, while much more recent releases suffer unexpected quitting or serious bugs. Vendor support sites can help.

Comments For the moment, Migration Assistant is located in /Applications/Utilities.

Before starting any migration, you should first check the compatibility of your most important apps with the new version of OS X which you will be running, and perform any upgrades on your old Mac, if you can. Then decide how much you wish to migrate.

Sometimes it is more efficient to let Migration Assistant handle settings and apps, and copy over needed documents from your Home folder using file sharing on the network. This gives you a chance to perform some housekeeping at the same time, and saves clogging up your new Mac with old files which are better archived.

Updated from the original, which was first published in MacUser volume 29 issue 13, 2013.