What's the best way to migrate/import my Mac data without using Migrations Assistant?

Grab the folders from ur user set up and take them off, where are you putting them?

Woah, i just did the same thing while doing a fresh install from leopard.

The address book is the easiest part, File – Export – Address Book Archive. Copy this archive file somewhere and import it to your new machine.

For iTunes, just copy the iTunes folder in the Music folder of your machine. Paste it onto your new machine (if it asks you to if you want to replace click yes). This is helpful cause if keeps your playcount and other stuff.

For iPhoto, copy the file called iPhoto Library (in your Pictures folder) and paste it onto your music folder. Just make sure you are on the latest version of iPhoto to be safe i guess.

Idk about safari though. If you are a firefox user, Bookmarks – Organize Bookmarks – hit the icon on top that kinda looks like a star and click BackUp.

This worked perfectly for me while doing a fresh install of snow leopard (i re-installed leopard and then installed snow leopard). I’d still make a backup of your files to be safe though.

A couple tips to add to mirza’s answer:

iTunes and iPhoto:
You can select which folder to open by holding Option during startup.
Libraries are not usually backward compatible to earlier versions of iTunes and iPhoto.

Contacts and Bookmarks:
Sign up for a 60-day trial of MobileMe. Sync the source computer with the cloud, then the new computer with the cloud. Keep it running for a couple weeks if you want to use the computers together. Then cancel. Apple makes it painless. (Or keep it. Do you use an iPhone? Over-the-air syncing is wicked nice.)

Ensure that the applications are not open when copying in these files. If the files already exist, delete them. That’s especially true for iTunes.

—

Safari Bookmarks
~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist

iTunes Library
~/Music/iTunes/
Note: While you will have to reauthorize protected stuff bought from the iTunes Store, copying in everything here will make sure that iTunes remembers your iPhone and your iPhone doesn’t need restoring; it’ll just carry on working.

Address Book
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/
Note: While you can copy this directory, doing File, then Export, and Address Book Archive is “cleaner”. You can import it by doing File, Import and Address Book Archive, or opening the archive. Note that importing an archive replaces the existing Address Book DB.

iPhoto Library
~/Pictures/iPhoto Library

—

Enjoy.

RE @pnm:

“Libraries are not usually backward compatible to earlier versions of iTunes and iPhoto.”

Good point.

@andrew Nothing to add to the above, but can I just ask: why not use the Migration Assistant? Or just use ma’ big bud’ Disk Utility to copy your whole drive A to drive B. (and then upgrade to Snow Leopard, ‘coz I guess your doing that?)

Small tip: Although Snow Leopard is “upgrade only”, it’s only enforced in the license agreement. As in, you don’t actually need to have Leopard installed on the drive at all in order to run a Snow Leopard installation; it doesn’t check that you’ve already installed Leopard.

@pnm That’s a great idea… except for the fact that it’s just the HD that I swapped out.

I can’t boot off a time machine backup, right?

@andrew You can’t boot of a Time Machine backup, but you can when you copy your data to a new drive via Disk Utility or SuperDuper (and I believe also Carbon Copy Cloner)

Choose your poison :)

@andrew Restoring a Time Machine backup simply to sync your address book, bookmarks and calendar is unnecessary. Restore the library files to your new machine, and then if you like the idea of MobileMe, sign up and start syncing. At this point, it’s faster to manually copy the library files over.

@richardhenry GA to you, sir.

@andrew I’m one of these losers who reinstalls their OS every two or three months to keep things nice and tidy and to do a better job of customising things than I did before. If you need help with anything in particular, especially retaining settings from Adobe apps, let me know.