Update: 28/07/2011 – I followed this exact procedure to restore my (Snow Leopard) iTunes library into a fresh installation of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and it worked perfectly.

As I wrote in an earlier post, my iMac recently had a well overdue reinstall of everything. Whilst this is good news for the most part, it does cause problems with things like iTunes. I was particularly concerned about losing my iPhone backups. I needed to get my iTunes library back to how it used to be, including all my preferences, iPhone applications and backups. How do you do this though? The only bit of information Apple provide on their website is how to migrate your data from an old mac to a new mac, when you have both machines available. What if your old mac is your new mac? I didnt want to restore a Time Machine backup, as I wanted to ensure this was a fresh start, and not be bringing a load of stuff over that I wanted rid of. The migration assistant was of no use either.

Google wasn’t much help initially, but I did eventually come across this gem.

Whilst, like Apple, that article does discuss the process of copying from one physical machine to another, the process described works just as well when copying from a backup. In my case, I backed up the entire hard drive contents of my iMac using SuperDuper! before I wiped the iMac clean. So I had every file I’d ever need, including old system files.

A friend of mine recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and asked me how he could transfer his iTunes stuff to it from his G4 iMac. As he was not familiar with the Terminal, or Unix/Linux commands, I gave him an expanded version of the above article. If you’re in the same boat, here is the full process he followed to ‘restore’ iTunes:

Notes:
The backup drive (or in this case, a target-disk-mode iMac) is referenced here as /Volumes/BACKUP. You will need to substitute this in the paths below with the location of your backup.
To make things as clear as possible, I’ve used blue to show source paths (where your backups are), and orange for destination paths (on your new Mac).
The commands as displayed below may span several lines, but they are all entered on one line in Terminal, followed by Enter/Return.

• Close iTunes if it is currently running, and ensure your iPhone/iPod is not connected to your Mac.
• Open the ‘Terminal’ application. The following commands all need to be performed at the command line in Terminal.
• Copy your iTunes folder from your backup to its new location (this could take a while, be patient!):

cp -R /Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Music/iTunes /Users/rob/Music/

• Followed by your iPhone/iPod backups (the double quotes are important here):

cp -R “/Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Library/Application Support/MobileSync” “/Users/rob/Library/Application Support/“

• Then your iTunes configuration files:

cp /Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes* /Users/rob/Library/Preferences/

• Open iTunes on your new Mac, and verify that all looks as it once did. Your Applications and Ringtones should also be showing (if applicable).
• Connect your iPhone/iPod and synchronise.

Many thanks to Major at RackerHacker.com for the original article which this information is based on.

3 Responses to “Migrating iTunes/iPod/iPhone from Old Mac (Backup) to New Mac”

1. Eduardo Alicandu says:

   November 29, 2009 at 4:55 AM

   Thank you so much! it works for me perfectly.

   Regards
2. Rob L says:

   July 14, 2010 at 10:21 PM

   Thanks, worked for me too )
3. Ramon says:

   December 26, 2010 at 12:24 PM

   Thank you so much for the posting. It worked perfect!!