I switched to a MacBook Pro 17 inch 2.8GHz back in June when the older MacBook Pro suffered the infamous black screen of death. During the file transfer, I basically allowed Migration Assistant to do its thing on auto-pilot. I did encounter some errors during the process, but never bothered deciphering the error log since all my files apparently made the jump.

I think I know what went wrong. I had some symbolic links (ln -s) set up on the older MacBook Pro. Migration Assistant doesn’t play well with symbolic links and didn’t re-create them on the new computer. So, while using Filemaker to output some data files, my script choked because the output path that relied on symbolic links was invalid. The other thing I discovered is that Make Alias, which works the same as a symbolic link in the point-and-click world, really isn’t exactly the same. Filemaker didn’t like paths that contain a Make Alias folder. When I recreated the symbolic link, the problems disappeared.