Migration Assistant stuck on Updating System Settings for days now.

Leroy, thanks for taking the time to answer, but not really helpful.

I said. "If I cancel, it wipes out all the transferred data..." just like nothing happened, so rebooting would be very similar to canceling would it not? So how would rebooting be any different than canceling and rebooting? Are you suggesting I do a hard shutdown and reboot? That's a great way to damage a drive's structure if writes are going on.

Your advice on backup is not helpful at all and has nothing to do with this question. I have a number of backups actually (2 local, 2 remote), I just would rather migrate than download backup files and rebuild and set up everything again.

This was the initial boot of a brand new machine, and it asks if you want to migrate, then launches the migration assistant to do the transfer. M2s obviously have not been around that long, I assumed it was obvious, but maybe not. And Set Up runs the Migration Assistant to do the transfer to the new machine. When it failed, I also reinitialized the M2 to "new" and tried again, so just like brand new.

And the name of my question was "migration assistant stuck..." so obviously I am using migration assistant. So why would you just assume I was trying some other way? Again, might help to read my entire question before answering.

Thanks anyway, I do appreciate that you wanted to help. Just didn't tell me anything I did not already know from this this and the other thread, and I have been using Macs since the very first one, so kind of know how to use them.

cheers

Thanks for the answer. Not my first rodeo, so yea, tired both machine to machine, and TimeMachine to machine with the exact same results. I have off site backups (several actually) but I really wanted the machine to be an exact copy of the 1 year old machine it was replacing, so I did not choose to recover that way, as no settings come along, and email can get really screwed up.

And yes, after waiting almost 2 days to see if it would finish on its own, I had to do a force shutdown. Several times on each attempt. Each time, when the machine rebooted, it was back to the non-updated original state, as if all the files it said it transferred had not been transferred. (That surprised me, but I suspect the files are not marked active until the very end so if the migration is stopped, there is "nothing there.)

And yes, I used set up assistant with the same results, and then tried migration assistant.

So thanks for all the suggestions, but I had tried them all already. Hopefully your suggestions will help others, but not me. That said...

I did finally get it to migrate to the new machine. I updated the MacOS on the source machine to the exact same as the one on the target machine, did a time machine backup, which went fairly fast and then did the migration. That all took a few hours (because I have a lot of files), but in the end, the target machine was properly updated with my previous settings, files, and all.