Time Machine from Lion to Mountain Lion after my iMac goes BANG!

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My 2006 iMac stopped working last night following a rather large bang and a smell of smoke coming from the back ! I have had a feeling it has been on its last legs for a few weeks as it has slowed quite a bit.

Anyway, thankfully I had Time Machine up and running and didn't lose anything.

Now when I buy a new iMac it is going to have Mountain Lion installed - will I be able to put all my documents from a Time Machine that was using Lion on to an imac running Mountain Lion?

Im not too fussed about installing the whole Lion OS, I'd rather start from a fresh install of Mountain Lion.

Could I get a new iMac, set it all up, and then copy and paste documents on to the new fresh install manually from my external HDD? I'm not too fussed about having to reinstall all my applications as I have all the originals, but I've never looked into my external HDD to see how the whole Time Machine thing is set up.

Can anyone advise?

Many thanks
Liam
 

cwa107


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In a word, yes.

When you boot up the new iMac, connect the Time Machine drive. You'll be prompted to "transfer data from another Mac" (this is known as the Migration Assistant) - and one of the options is to import from a Time Machine backup.
 
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Thanks for the prompt response. Does that mean I can choose to copy over just my documents and files rather than the whole operating system files etc?

Thanks
 

dtravis7


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Sounds like the Power Supply went BANG! Had that with my iMac G5 iSight! WEnt bang then black!

CWA answered your other question.
 

cwa107


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Thanks for the prompt response. Does that mean I can choose to copy over just my documents and files rather than the whole operating system files etc?

Thanks

The MIgration Assistant is only concerned with user-specific data, not the OS or core system files. You can also selectively choose which user-specific data you want to bring in. It might be a good idea to not import apps, as chances are, at least a few of these are obsolete or don't run under Mountain Lion.
 

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