Manually Migrating from Mac to Windows or Windows to Mac

If you're migrating to a new computer of a different type (that is, if you're moving from Mac to Windows or Windows to Mac), there isn't a simple migration utility that will move everything for you. In this case, you'll have to do it manually with an external hard drive. This is actually quite simple to do, and since you don't have any settings to move, you don't really need an extra utility—it's just a matter of drag-and-drop.

The first thing you'll have to do is format your drive to work with your old computer. If your old computer is a Windows machine, plug it in and right-click on its entry in Windows Explorer. Hit the "Format" button, and choose NTFS as the file system. A Quick Format is fine; we just need to make it compatible with this computer. Note that this will erase anything currently on the drive; so make sure it doesn't have anything on it you want to keep.

On a Mac, open up Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities and find your external drive in the list on the left. Click on it, and then hit the "Erase" tab on the right. If you have any files over 4 GB (like movies), you'll need to format it as "Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)", otherwise you can choose FAT32. Hit Erase. Again, this will erase everything on the drive.

Next, open up the newly formatted drive in your file explorer (Windows Explorer on Windows, Finder on the Mac). Open up another window in your file explorer and head to your user folder. On Windows, your user folder is located at C:\Users\Username, and on a Mac you can access it by clicking on your username in the Finder sidebar. In both cases, you should see all your user folders—like Documents, Music, Movies, Photos, and Desktop.

If you formatted your drive as Mac OS X Extended, note that you won't be able to read it on the Windows machine. You'll need something like previously mentioned HFSExplorer to get those files off.

Drag all of the folders in which you've saved files—like your Documents, Photos, and Music folders—to your external drive. You don't need to drag every folder in there, just the ones you use—folders like AppData on Windows or Library on OS X don't need to be copied.

Once it finishes, unplug the drive and plug it into your new computer. From there, you can open up each folder individually and drag those files wherever you want. For example, you can open up the Documents folder on your external drive, and drag all those files to the Documents folder on your new computer. Once you're done, you should have quick access to all your old files, whether they be documents, music, or photos, and you won't need to use your old computer anymore