Got your eye on a new computer? Maybe you've picked your fav from the 20 or so laptops that were released yesterday. But how do you leave your old machine behind without ditching your data? Fear not, migration newbie, we'll help you get settled into your new machine without a hitch.

We're going to cover the process in a few separate parts, but let's start with Mac users moving machines. Windows users, don't despair, we have a guide for you too.

Like most things with the Mac, moving your files between two machines is made a little easier through a program provided by Apple. Called Migration Assistant, this application is located in /Applications/Utilities/. The program will guide you through moving your data and settings, step by step, and help you back up your most important files, user preferences and other settings. Migration Assistant is designed to move your user account, applications, network settings, other custom control panel settings, and other files on the hard drive as well as entire volumes if necessary. To run the program, have your administrator password in hand and then follow the onscreen prompts. Migration Assistant will move the files to the new computer via a Firewire cable connection or using a network connection, or it can copy the files to an external hard drive you can both use as a backup and to transfer the files over to your new machine.

Migration Assistant is great, but if you're moving from a Mac to a PC, unfortunately the software won't help that much. Knowing how to manually backup your files is definitely useful, so lets break down some of the basics.

Transferring files can be a pretty simple process if you do a little bit of work planning out your move. Start by surveying exactly which files you open most frequently. Peruse all your frequent locations, like your Home folder, pictures folder, music folder and Applications folder. You'll likely come across files that are important, however, that you don't use frequently. Take this opportunity to back up your most important files to a secure location other than your primary machine. Think about using a secure online backup solution like Jungle Disk, Box.net or Apple's MobileMe to keep your most important files safe, should your regular machine eat the dirt. Another option is to backup to an external hard drive you can store offsite.

After backing up your files to secure locations, we now need to start backing up files in preparation for the new machine. If you can, try to network your machines together and transfer your files using network file sharing. It'll save a lot of hassle with external drive partition formats, among other problems. If networking your machines isn't an option, go external. External hard drives have sharply dropped in price over the past few years, and now finding a drive up to 1TB in size can cost you less than $200. External drives are a great way to backup files, however when you initially purchase the drive, formatting the partitions properly is an important step.

Users should choose their partition type according to their compatibility needs. Hard drives can be formatted with different file system types, and which type you use impacts what platforms the drive will be compatible with. Typically, cross-platformers using both Mac and Windows will need to use FAT32, which is a 10-year-old file system, to accomplish that goal. FAT32 works broadly with both operating systems, however the partition type has some major limitations. Files stored on FAT32 can't be any larger than 4GB, so if you're looking to transfer over that DVD of Smurfs cartoons, you might want to think about networking the machines instead of using external hard drives. In the days of gigantic drives and multiple machines, we'd recommend creating multiple partition types on external drives, which creates some backup flexibility for those large files, but also is a good way to utilize more space on the drive. Creating an HFS+ partition will let Mac users transfer big files, though PC users won't be able to see the files, and an NTFS partition can be read by both OSes, but only Windows can write to it.

So now you've got your external hard drive formatted properly and you need to actually backup your files. While you can do the simple step of dragging and dropping folders as a good start, perhaps using a utility to backup a drive might be a better option. If you'd like to save the entire contents of a drive tor future use, we like Carbon Copy Cloner as a way to backup an entire disk. The software is free, and will perform a backup at the most basic level, ensuring all your data is backed up block by block including preferences and system files that a simple drag and drop won't usually pick up. The software can even clone hard drives to external drives, so, with a big enough drive, you could preserve all of your data when moving to a new machine. It can create bootable backups as well which can be handy in case of system failure down the road.

Hopefully you're caught up on backing up your files, so that new MacBook will be ready and waiting for you, once it finally arrives. If you're a Windows user, check out part two of our series for getting data off Windows machines in preparation for your next upgrade. Happy computing!