BACK UP YOUR OLD PC WINDOWS PCS AND

Moving from a Windows machine to a Mac? Here’s what you should know

Macs run completely different operating systems, so there’s always going to be some adjustment when it comes to moving from PC to Mac. But it’s easier than ever before to move your essential documents, photos, and files from one to the other.

In many cases you don’t need to move anything. If your email is Gmail, your messages aren’t stored on your computer; they live in the cloud, and you can access them in Safari just as you did in Edge. You can also add Gmail to the Mail app on macOS by going to Mail > Add Account. It takes about one minute. It’s the same with Google Docs and other cloud– based services.

One of the biggest differences when you move from a Windows PC to a Mac is that not all of the apps are the same. However, that’s much less of a problem than it used to be: all the key apps such as Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Steam, Microsoft Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and so on are also available on the Mac. Although you can’t usually transfer the license for a paid PC app to a Mac one, there are exceptions: if you’re an Office 365 subscriber, go to office.com/myaccount on your Mac and look for Install > Install Information and deactivate your Windows PC. You can now install Office on your Mac and use the same license. Similarly with Adobe

Creative Cloud, your subscription is linked to you, not your computer.

In many cases, though, we’d recommend trying native Mac apps rather than looking to replicate your PC experience exactly. For example, Apple’s Pages and Numbers are excellent alternatives to Word and Excel, and can read and write Word and Excel documents. There are stacks of wonderful third–party apps out there too, and some have no direct equivalent on PC, such as Apple’s glorious GarageBand.

MAC TO PC PORT

Actually moving from Mac to PC depends very much on what you’d like to do. The easiest way by far is to use Apple’s Migration Assistant, which we’ll cover over the page. It automatically exports from the likes of Outlook and copies photos, videos, music, and documents across automatically. If you’d like more control you can simply

copy files and folders from your PC to an external drive, and then plug it into your Mac and copy them across; if you don’t have huge amounts to copy, a free service such as OneDrive gives you 5GB of cloud storage accessible on PC and Mac alike.

Whatever method you choose, it’s very important that you don’t erase your Windows PC until you’re absolutely sure that everything important has been carried across.