This is the first of hopefully many highlighted use cases for rooSwitch. This was written by myself and exists in the forums here. Again, if you’re using rooSwitch in an interesting way please talk about it in the forums.

My PowerBook is 10 months old now and instead of paying $300 for two more years of AppleCare for it, I decided to “trade it in” for a MacBook. I’m now at the point where my PowerBook is sold but I’ve yet to get my MacBook. I need to move the critical data (Mail and friends) from my PowerBook to my iMac for temporary usage and then later from the iMac to the MacBook. Migration Assistant is great, but it’s overkill for this. rooSwitch to the rescue.

Here’s what I did on my PowerBook (rinse and repeat per application):

1. Quit the application
2. Drop the application on rooSwitch
3. Close the rooSwitch window
4. Copy the new .rooSwitch bundle for this app to my iMac

Now, over on the iMac I would:

1. open the new .rooSwitch file
2. “restore” the ‘default’ profile

Done.

Why does this work?

rooSwitch will use relative paths if it detects the files being switched are in your home directory. When you drop an application on rooSwitch it creates an initial backup of the data as it exists at that time. The applications being switched were already on both machines.

For those curious, I moved the following applications:

• Mail (this was the important one)
• NetNewsWire
• OmniOutliner (just the settings, not the docs. The docs are already on shared storage)
• K.I.T.
• Feeder
• ecto

The whole process, although straight forward, was quite tedious. Maybe you’ll see this streamlined in rooSwitch 2.0 (wink wink)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 2:01 pm and is filed under rooSwitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.