How to move a Radio Weblog to another machine

Thanks to recent problems with my aging Pismo PowerBook, I am using a borrowed laptop and a collection of older Mac OS 9.x-based machines to do my work while the Pismo's LCD problem is being fixed. In the transition, it was easy to get my email, my organizer program and most other applications running on a FireWire drive attached to my wife's Pismo, but working with Radio this way was another story...

One of the strengths and weaknesses of Radio is that it lives on your own hard drive. This is great in terms of being in complete control of your own data, but Radio also builds itself and all of its files in a specific directory structure, and in my experience this means that in order to ensure that Radio will run the same from one machine to another you need to have duplicate directories - the same hard drive partition name and everything else on down the line. I already knew this from previous versions of Radio, so I have the same main partition name on my PowerBook 3400c as I do on my Pismo.

In order to get Mac Net Journal running with Radio updating everything as expected on my 3400c, I just copied my complete Radio folder from my OS X PowerBook over to the older PowerBook with the same directory structure. Then I removed the OS X version of the Radio application and downloaded the OS 9.x version of Radio 8 and placed its application in my directory structure exactly where the OS X version had previously been. I double clicked the OS 9.x version of Radio and everything ran like it always does on my Pismo under OS X - though painfully slower...

This same kind or procedure should work moving from one Mac OS X machine to another, but the key thing to remember is to duplicate the directory structure when you copy the installation from one machine to another. And I assume that the same kind of thing can be done to move from one Windows machine to another.

Russ Lipton has already done a great job detailing how to go about keeping a regular backup of your critical Radio files, and his writing in that document made my transition pretty simple. Now I just can't wait to get back to my regular G3 PowerBook rather than this old machine that cannot even run OS X.

Have any comments or corrections to this story? Just send them to me at rob@whiterabbits.com.