I’m trying to figure out if I can migrate from my old MBP that has only USB and Thunderbolt 2 connections to my new M1 MBP without having to buy another cable. I have a cable that came with my Lacie Mobile Drive that is USB-C and USB 3.0, male on both ends. I know the speed would suffer, but can this cable be used to connect the two machines for migration? I currently used this cable to back up the old Mac to the Lacie drive with the USB 3.0 end attached to the old Mac. Thanks.
USB is not a networking protocol so you cannot directly connect two USB Macs (essentially 2 hosts) as such. You would instead need to use something like TDM. However, you cannot use a USB TDM connection with Migration Assistant unless both clients are on Catalina or earlier, which is obviously not the case for your new MBP. On newer versions of macOS, TDM is exclusively TB (or FW?).
However, MA can restore from a TM backup or clone. So if that LaCie disk contains either a TM backup or you had something like SD or CCC clone your 2013 MBP to it, you can connect that disk to your new MBP when MA asks how you want to migrate.
Finally, you can also use a direct wifi connection between old and new Mac to migrate without having to buy a new cable. That does work, it’s just slow. Ideally, you’d want to use at least wired Gigabit and better yet a direct TB2 connection.
Okay, I have a SuperDuper full clone on the LaCie disk. I also use an older OWC Mercury Elite Pro for Time Machine. While that disk is connected via USB, I do have an Apple USB-C to USB adapter that should work with it. Would either of these options be suitable?
TM backups and clones can both be used by MA. If you have a cable to connect these disks to your new MBP’s USB-C ports you should be fine.
Simon, I seemed to successfully migrate from the SD clone and everything appeared to be okay. Then the preferences window said I should log out and back in for some reason which I did. I should say that my old MBP was backed up to iCloud and all those files/folders initially appeared on the new mac before I did the aforementioned logout/login. At that point all the stuff on iCloud no longer shows up on the new mac. When I look at the iCloud preferences window it still show that iCloud contains all that stuff. Any idea what has happened?
Never mind. For some reason the checkbox for desktop and document folders had been unchecked in the iCloud options. Checking it solved the problem. Thanks for your help.