You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

How do I migrate my files from old computer to new using a cable. (Because the WiFi says some of the things I need to migrate are too big to do via WiFi.)

I bought a new iMac (High Sierra) to replace my old iMac from 2013. Migration of my data from the old does not work via WiFi, because I don't have enough space on my new computer. I purchased a cable to connect the two computers. Now I need to know, how do I move the files with this cable?

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 12, 2021 2:14 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 12, 2021 7:21 PM

If you bought the new 24-in Apple Silicon iMac, you may also want to take a look at Transfer files between a Mac with Apple silicon and another Mac - Apple Support.


It also depends on the answer to BDAqua’s free disk space question.

7 replies

Aug 12, 2021 2:44 PM in response to HazelLu

A cable won't cure the not enough space problem, it would likely speed it up though.


Have you emptied the trash lately?


Look for iOS backups…

/Users/[USERNAME]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup


OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/


Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates. 

Hit enter.


Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.


Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required


http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html


tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /  # deletes all the snapshots


How do I migrate my files from old computer to new using a cable. (Because the WiFi says some of the things I need to migrate are too big to do via WiFi.)

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.