Help upgrading from a 2009 iMac to 2017 iMac

[Archmage2002]

My current iMac is running 10.9.5 and is a 2009 i7, 1tb hard drive, 12gb ram with a self-upgraded AMD Radeon HD 6970m 2gb graphics card in it. The SuperDrive has gone bad on it and at one point I considered yanking it to an SSD drive but I have decided its time to retire this beast of a machine because it is now 9 years old.

My new machine is going to be the 5k i7 with 1tb SSD drive and Pro 580 but I am having a few concerns with transferring my data over to the new machine. Should I use the Migration Assistant? An external hard drive or use the cloud?

I am leaning towards buying an external hard drive and putting all the apps, music and files I need on it and then sell my iMac back to Apple for credit and buy the new iMac with it. I can live a for a week or two with only my iPad if I need to.

Has anybody ever sold back to Apple before or any of those other online places? Would they consider my upgraded graphics card a plus or a minus? Most of them don't seem to offer an option to select a bad SuperDrive as an option for and instead make me choose between works perfectly, partially working and not working which doesn't fit my machine at all, in my opinion, my machine is 99% functional.

 

[STC1709]

I would just use an external HD, it always good to have backups on other drives. I own an 09 iMac too and will be looking to buy a 2017 iMac 3rd tier 21.5in

as far selling back, normally i would just wipe the hard drive reinstall the os and put it on craigslist and meet the person

should be able to get 300-500 for our iMacs

 

[JRussRhodes]

I'm in a similar situation, I have an early '08. Gut I have a 2TB external drive attached and am using Time Machine to back up my iMac. Last time I replaced my iMac the new machine booted up and asked me if there was a Time Machine volume attached and if so did I want to reproduce from the last save. Click "yes" and walk away for an hour or so, and everything is there.

 

[Archmage2002]

I'm in a similar situation, I have an early '08. Gut I have a 2TB external drive attached and am using Time Machine to back up my iMac. Last time I replaced my iMac the new machine booted up and asked me if there was a Time Machine volume attached and if so did I want to reproduce from the last save. Click "yes" and walk away for an hour or so, and everything is there.

On the Time Machine backup do you know if it is required for them to use the same OS version? I don't really want to upgrade from my 10.9.5 because I consider this the sweet spot for my model of iMac. If I upgrade it to Sierra it will actually run slower since my machine can't take advantage of all the new features introduced.

 

[JRussRhodes]

As I recall, and it has been a while, the answer is no. The newer machine recognizes that it is running newer OS software, but I will bow to someone else's more recent experience. In any event using Time Machine is worth the time and investment. It has saved my bacon once when a mid-board failed and made my last transition between machines utterly painless.

 

[Mg555]

As I recall, and it has been a while, the answer is no. The newer machine recognizes that it is running newer OS software, but I will bow to someone else's more recent experience. In any event using Time Machine is worth the time and investment. It has saved my bacon once when a mid-board failed and made my last transition between machines utterly painless.

I have a Time Machine backup from my old iMac on an external HD and want to transfer to my future 2017 iMac just certain things (i.e. photos, documents but no software programs). Is there a way to selectively transfer over only certain items OR do you have to do a full transfer of the Time Machine backup?