As I prepare to take my M1 MacBook Air (running Sequoia) in for keyboard repairs (anyone else experience catastrophic failures with that model’s keyboard?), I want to make sure I have a good-enough backup on an older 2013 (Intel) MacBook running Big Sur.
Doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles, but it’d be great if I could move (via Time Machine or whatever) all my basic preferences (browser bookmarks, keyboard shortcuts, BBEdit pref files, etc.) over to the older machine.
Can anything like this be done easily? (Ideally, without wiping the other profiles on the older MacBook.)
I’m not on Sequoia yet but if I wanted to do a similar thing on my machines I would use Migration Assistant with a Time Machine backup. If I remember correctly, it is possible to add a user to an existing macOS installation and to rename user accounts before migration. This would allow me to “back up” my current user account (say, Halfsmoke) to an older Mac using a new user account name (say, Halfsmoke2).
Big Sur is not aware about changes made in later macOS versions. And so will have multiple issues ingesting a Sequoia backup. This is always true when attempting to go back macOS versions. The more versions, the worse it gets.
If BS can see your Sequoia TM backup in Finder (I am not sure it will), then that disk is your fall back source of data.
You may be able to copy some stuff (e.g. document and photo files) fairly easily. Libraries (~/Library and Photos libraries) will not be directly usable.
Whatever else you do, do not let BS make any changes to your Sequoia backup disk.