Migrating memoQ with Mac Parallels

A recurring complaint among memoQ users is the perceived (and actual) difficulty of moving all one's resources to a new computer when it's time to retire the old one. My favorite strategy is to create a single backup file for all my projects and restore that on a new machine, though this still leaves some details to clean up like moving light resources that don't happen to be included in any of those projects. Some people like to make a dummy project and attach all the heavy resources to that, but this is really only a viable option if you work in a single language pair. There are other strategies, of course, some better than others, given the particular situation.

Recently, a colleague who prefers to work on Apple Macintosh computers with Windows running in a Parallels virtual machine (VM) shared her new approach to migration. Apparently it's working well. And I suspect that the same approach could be used with a Windows VM under Windows as I used to do a lot in the days I tested more unstable software and needed to quarantine potential disasters.

Rather than re-install everything on the new machine, she simply

1. installed Parallels on the new Mac,
2. copied the VM file from the old Mac to the new one and
3. copied resource folders to an identical path on the new Mac.

That's all. The fact that this is a virtual environment makes it all easier. So any memoQ user who runs the software using some virtual machine (VMware, Parallels, etc.) could do the same I suppose. Or any user with any operating system who runs Windows on a virtual machine.

That should have occurred to me earlier. Years ago I used to run several virtual machines with ancient versions of Windows to access old CD-based dictionaries that could not run under newer OS versions, but I've fallen out of that habit in recent years as the emphasis of my translation work shifted to other fields.