migration assistant: migrating to a smaller Mac

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migration assistant: migrating to a smaller Mac

I bought a 2017 edition Macbook Air to replace my husband's ancient Macbook Pro. Migration Assistant is not going very well. It turns out I did not do my homework very well, and the new Mac has much less storage space than the old Mac. I think that a lot of what's on the old computer is no longer needed, so we can probably get by with less space.

Yesterday I tried to do Migration Assistant between the two, choosing only Computer & Network Settings + Documents. Then I chose to migrate over only a subset of the documents. The Migration Assistant silently failed. It ran for 4 hours and at the end nothing had been migrated. The old Mac showed some errors of things like Printer Drivers that could not be transferred. The new Mac was hung and had to be power cycled.

Today I am thinking of trying this instead, and I wanted to see if I could get some expert advice first.

Run Migration Assistant to transfer over Computer & Network Settings and Applications. I'll deselect Documents.
After Migration Assistant runs, look through the Applications folder and delete the apps that transferred that are no longer needed.
Copy all of the files on the old Mac to an external disk.
Attach the disk to the new Mac and copy those over just using Finder.

Questions: Will I run into any troubles doing this? I'm wondering if there are things in the ~/Libraries folder that won't transfer well this way. Also, if I can use Migration Assistant to pick and choose which Applications to migrate, that would be great, but I'm not sure if that will be possible.

Thanks for any advice.

Posted on Dec 9, 2019 9:47 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

jeanisannoyed Author

Level 1

24 points

Dec 9, 2019 10:48 AM in response to dwb

Thanks for the reply. I left out the part where I tried to use a Time Machine backup and failed.

I have an external disk used for Time Machine backups for two computers. I hooked the disk directly up to the new Mac. In Migration Assistant, I chose my husband's backup and clicked Continue. The next screen asked me to choose a volume, but the text box where the volumes were supposed to be listed was blank.

I managed to solve this just now. I hooked the drive back up the new Mac, and this time, I mounted the Time Machine backup for my husband's computer before I started Migration Assistant. Migration Assistant could then read the Time Machine backup appropriately. Transfer just started. We'll see how it goes.

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Answer 2

dwb

Level 7

33,082 points

Dec 9, 2019 10:25 AM in response to jeanisannoyed

It is best to use a TimeMachine backup as your source for the Migration (unless you are able to use Disk Target Mode which probably isn't possible if you are transferring from a very old computer). Migrating over WiFi is a recipe for disaster and using Ethernet unfortunately isn't much better.

I've been in your shoes. My choice was a bit different. I cloned my older computer to an external drive (I used SuperDuper! by https://shirt-pocket.com) and then began deleting things from it until I got down to the required size. (Don't forget that Apple recommends that you leave about 15G free, so if your new computer has a 512GB drive, don't put more than 495GB on it.) Once I was finished I booted the old computer with that external drive to ensure that it worked and that all my apps worked. After doing this step I could have either used Migration Assistant to migrate everything or SuperDuper! to clone the new computer. Note - cloning was possible because my old and new computer had the same OS.

You must migrate applications, clone them or reinstall them fresh because programs often have files located in places other than the Applications folder. This is why I used a cloned external drive as an intermediary. I didn't want to delete anything from my old computer until I had a working new computer.

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migration assistant: migrating to a smaller Mac

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