Interesting read over at Switch To A Mac about a Windows Migration Assistant in OS X Leopard. Other Apple news: portents of Mac growth, antiVirus company suggests home users switch to Macs.
Desired Feature in Leopard: Windows Migration Assistant
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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A good idea but something that I would find especially useful would be a an hfs+ (journeled) driver for windows and linux included with Leopard that could be installed on any computer you own so you can natively read and write the hfs+ journeled file system.
I think a lot of people are put off by using Fat volumes on their external harddrives for compatibality because of the inharent stability issues and likelihood of losing data.
Most people that buy a Mac still own and or use a pc, to ease the sharing of information between them is a sure way to lure in more customers.
Was this to be the case, everyone using Boot Camp and installing this software on Windows, might very well be at risk of malicious code being executed on the installed copy of Windows, damaging the Mac OS X installation, should anyone have fun writing such code…
I highly doubt that Apple would be interested posing a potetial risk of hurting users in this way.
Is this not the real reason for NTFS being read only and regarded as ‘experimental’ on looking through Linux kernel documentation…? The fact that NTFS writes might potentially damage your NTFS filesystem?
I seriously think so!
What I meant to say was that the reason Apple hasn’t included NTFS write support in Mac OS X is the question of reliability, hence my comment on the Linux NTFS write enabled driver…
And my other point is that I doubt Apple would jeopardize Boot Camp users’ guard against Windows viruses capable of bringing down an OSX system, Windows’ inability to read/write to hfs partitions.
Spotlight can already index FAT and NTFS filesystems, so this is an simple as turning on the indexing for the given filesystem and copying everything that indexes as a document, music, video, photo, etc. file. Deciding what files are probably appropriate to transfer is simple given the current available technology, yet that is what this author thinks is complex.
The hard part is what to do with file formats. You have to run all the importers for various applications, for example to import an Outlook mailbox into Mail.app. Some file formats will be inevitably unsupported, in which case Spotlight might not even be able to find them, let alone the migrator figuring out how to convert them to something native.
So you can get most of the way there with a very simple wrapper around Spolight and a relatively simple script that runs the importers for the common native apps on files of their data types. But it’s really hard to make this work to the level where users could simply run the migrator and then get rid of the data on the Windows filesystem. There’s always going to be some manual file selection, and there will be files or settings that are tricky or impossible to use on a Mac.