Or at least put a copy up in the cloud - somewhere like dropbox or onedrive. Not useful for confidential data of course but most dissertations aren't.

I did my dissertation so long ago there isn't even an electronic copy in the first place. yes, I am old.

I was thinking less from a backup perspective, and more from a version control option, given Levick's comments on the subject.

IIRC Dropbox does actually do versioning of some sort doesn't it?

With large writes ups or essays, I would save with a filename + increasing version number eg dissertation title 001. Every time I opened it and started writing a decent amount, I would resave it as a different version. I would upload a copy to google drive as well. The aim was always to have to do the least work again if a version became corrupt or lost.

She has 1TB of OneDrive space...

I'm putting Carbonite on the new Mac, when it arrives...

OneDrive definitely does do versioning.

Same - hand written and then typed up

New MacBook Pro 13 is there and recovering the data from the old HD - I bought a USB-C to USB-A dongle with it.

First impressions are a bit ho-hum. It looks very chic, although no better or worse than my HP Spectre X360. However the keyboard is attrocious! Why they bothered with a keyboard at all, and didn't just build an iPad touch screen into the base to act as a keyboard, I don't know.

It is certainly the worst keyboard I've ever experienced on a mobile device (well, the worst ever). Even cheap 150€ Windows laptops and Chromebooks have better keyboards.

It also isn't very helpful with the progress of copying the data from the old drive - after the process started, the screen turned off, now I just have a pitch black display with a spinning beachball! Very user friendly.

Still, if it manages to copy all of her data onto the new machine, I'll be very happy.

After 2 hours of black screen, I broke off the installation and started again. It took ages, without the external drive plugged in, it makes setting up Windows feel like an express experience.

Plugging the external drive in afterwards caused a kernel panic. After 5 kernel panics, I gave up and plugged it into my old iMac. That didn't crash, but Disk First Aid gave up and said I should copy as many files off the drive as I could - given that I ran DFA because Disk Utility couldn't mount the drive, it means that all the files are gone.

But it seems that it is a common problem, that the new MacBook Pros have a kernel panic, when external drives are plugged into them, judging by Apple's forums.

So how are people supposed to transfer data from old machines?

Glad my little Macbook is still chugging along happily

It only happens when you connect a dead drive to them. Same as when Windows hangs trying to read a broken drive.

Not much good if you need to fix a dead drive then lol

There are ways of getting data off a corrupt drive, but all depends on the damage done so you can pick the appropriate technique

But I find it interesting that my iMac (stuck on Lion), tells me that the drive can't be mounted and that it can't be repaired, whilst the latest MacBook Pro goes tits-up.

But it looks like the drive died whilst it was trying to copy the data, because it started off okay, then went to a black screen after 5 minutes, then after aborting and starting again, it just kernel paniced.

And both Windows 7 and Windows 10 had no problems with freezing. They both loaded the drive up into Disk Manager and I could see the partitioning. The HPFS-Utility I had could sometimes see the drive, sometimes not (but couldn't access the data), Windows itself never froze.

As long s it is not a MAC??

Apple rewrote Disk Utility for El Capitan (IIRC). Many, many complaints ensued. Wouldn't actually surprise me that much if there were bits of it that were a bit broken.