In the years that I have used a Mac, I’ve run into remarkably few problems.

One notable exception was when I went to answer a Face Time call from my son on my 2013 iMac.  FaceTime said there was no camera connected.  Well, there’s a camera built-in, so yeah, I knew it was physically connected :).

I replaced my 2009 27″ iMac with a 27″ 2013 iMac several weeks ago and started to think about whether I had used the FaceTime camera since then—I hadn’t.  After testing that a few other applications (photo booth for one) couldn’t see the camera, and looking into the system profiler (which showed no camera), I looked to the system logs (console app on the Mac).  The only real message was that the camera couldn’t be opened:

VDCAssistant[488]: VDCAssistant: Found a camera (0x1470000005ac8511) , but was not able to start it up (0x0 -- (os/kern) successful)

But I kept looking and found a seemingly unrelated error in the USB subsystem:

apcupsd[193]: apcupsd FATAL ERROR in generic-usb.c at line 636

Well, I vaguely remember having installed the APC UPS daemon about 5 years ago on the old iMac, but wasn’t using it for anything.  A quick search yielded the best way to remove apcupsd from your OS X system:

rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/apcupsd
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/ApcupsdDummy.kext
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache

After these changes and a restart, my USB errors were gone, and apps that used the camera are now able to find it without a problem.

So that might be the one downside I can think of to using Time Machine to migrate your iMac from the old machine to a new one—it might copy over long ago forgotten software.  Still, if you don’t regularly use Time Machine to backup your Mac,  you really should.  TM made transferring my entire environment to the iMac very simple.  I’ve used it a number of times at work to help others migrate from older Macs to newer ones, and it easily beats re-installing all of your software and copying configuration settings.