OK, I have a mid-2011 iMac that is maxed out at MacOS 10.13.6 and have been backing it up with CCC 5.1.28. I have a newer refurbished 2020 iMac and was planning on using Migration Assistant over a Thunderbolt 2 cable this coming weekend.
HOWEVER, when my 2011 iMac booted up this morning, instead of using the internal HD, it booted up from the clone HD. The internal HD worked fine yesterday and I hope this was a fluke. But in case it isn’t, can I still use Migration Assistant with the old iMac booted up from the clone drive?
Yes. You can use Migration Assistant to migrate from a backup, a clone, or an original machine, depending on how they are connected to the target machine.
From the information you shared, I would shutdown the 2011 iMac, connect the clone HD to the 2020 iMac, and run Migration Assistant. That should be the fastest solution.
Actually that probably would be slower as I can only use USB that way. With the 2011 iMac booted to the internal HD I can use Thunderbolt 2 for the fastest. The question is if the 2011 is booted from the clone. I’m hoping that even though the clone HD is connected to the 2011 iMac via FireWire, using a Thunderbolt 2 cable between the 2 iMacs would be faster than USB.
Ah, so you’re planning to use Migration Assistant over a Thunderbolt bridge between the iMacs?
In that case, assuming that your Firewire drive is just a clone of your 2011 iMac, I’d skip the clone entirely and just do the migration directly from the 2011 Mac’s internal drive, which would be significantly faster than Firewire.
Today for some reason the 2011 iMac didn’t boot from the internal drive like it has done for the last 15 years. When I went into my office it had used the clone to boot up at the scheduled time. I don’t know why. I’m hoping it will boot from the internal drive tomorrow morning, Friday morning, Saturday morning, etc, so I CAN migrate via Thunderbolt between the two iMacs.
HOWEVER, just IN CASE the internal drive has gone tango uniform, I wanted to know IF it was possible to do it using the clone drive even though the NEW iMac DOES NOT have FireWire.
PREFERRED PLAN A:
Internal Drive booted OLD iMac Migration Assistant –> Thunderbolt 2 –> NEW iMac Migration Assistant
PLAN B:
Clone Drive –> FireWire –> booted OLD iMac Migration Assistant –> Thunderbolt 2 –> NEW iMac Migration Assistant
Migrating via FireWire may be problematic, because current versions of macOS don’t have driver support. But if you’re migrating into an old macOS that has support, then it should, in theory, work using a TB-FW adapter, like the one Apple used to sell, as long as the drive isn’t bus-powered (the TB-FW adapter doesn’t pass power).
That having been said, when I tried such a migration years ago (from a 2011 Mac mini to a 2018 mini), it didn’t really work. It seemed to connect, but was far slower than it should be. Maybe it was because of my long chain of adapters (TB3 → TB2 → FW800 → FW400). When I used the enclosure’s USB (2) port, it worked faster.
In my case, I couldn’t do a direct Mac-Mac transfer, because the 2011 mini was a server. The Migration Assistant server-side app refuses to run if Server.app is present (at least it did at that time). No good reason for Apple doing this, but that’s what they did. Hence my need to migrate from a backup, which mostly worked.
True, but except for WiFi, USB is the slowest way to migrate. Also my clone is already in a case that has both FireWire 400/800 and USB 480 Mbps connections while Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps. However, I’ll check that adapter out.
Edit. And ordered w/ delivery on Friday 10 Jul 26.
OK, I was about to do the migration yesterday when our monsoon decided to start and the power went out! So I started this morning, but it has been several years since I did a migration, that I don’t recall how long it took back then using FireWire 800.
I connected the two iMacs together using a Thunderbolt 2 cable and a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter and started migration assistant on both Macs. I know I’m limited to a maximum of 10 Gbps transfer speed but it has been 3 hours now so I wonder if there is a problem even though both iMacs say they are transferring documents. Is 3 hours or longer reasonable for migration using a Thunderbolt cable connection?
In view of the components used for the connection and the age of the older Mac I would be patient. For comparison new Time Machine backups used to take many hours.
Hmm, I’ll have to see if the old iMac tries to shutdown as scheduled at 11:30 PM and cancel it if it does. I didn’t think it would take 12 hours!
EDIT:
OK, I came back at about 10:45 PM and it said I only had to wait another 140 hours and 22 minutes to finish the migration! Less than 10 minutes later I was told that migration was complete.
Well, it looks like the migration bricked my new iMac. I was asked for my wifi password then told to click on the hard drive icon to continue. It got to the desktop and opened 4 windows one of which asked to grant access for an application on the new iMac. However the 4 windows are all grayed out, there ISN’T a hard drive icon on the desktop just an aliased folder labeled Relocated Items and the Dock. Clicking the cursor ANYWHERE does absolutely nothing. I doubt I can boot the new mac directly from the CCC cloned drive as it has MacOS 10.13.6 High Sierra. I’ll have to try to find Mac repair person to try and fix it and install fresh copy of MacOS 10.15.6 Catalina Then I’ll try installing EVERYTHING from the old High Sierra iMac manually since Migration apparently doesn’t work if there is more than one MacOS version difference.
Not true. I did a Migration Assistant from a MacPro5,1 (2010) running Mojave to a Mac Studio (2025) running Sequoia. I used a SuperDuper! clone that had a bootable system on it. Not much different than what you are doing. There must be something else that caused the issue.
I’ve found that for migration, using setup assistant in combination with a cloned backup (created by either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper) to be the most reliable method. No cable issues, no wifi issues, just “read the files from the drive”.
Dennis Swaney -
The new iMac with which you’re having trouble… can you reboot it now?
If so, what happens?
What do you see?
If necessary, take a [camera] pic or two of the screen and post it here.
If your image is in JPEG or PNG format, you can just drag/drop it to the Discourse editor window. You can also copy/paste from an image editor/viewer app.
This is how I share screen-shots. I use CMD-SHIFT-5, configured to open snapshots in Preview. From there, I make simple edits, then copy the image and paste it into Discourse.