The best way to migrate to my new MacBook Pro M1 Pro

Exactly. The migration from Time Machine took 6 or 7 hours, but then everything basically “just worked” with the same histories and settings, etc.

1 Like

I don’t (didn’t) see app prefs as a big deal. I’m pleased I went the ‘manual’ route as it meant years and years of outdated and unnecessary cruft was gone. It gave me an opportunity to make a conscious assessment of what I really needed on my machine rather than blindly copying it all across.

The app I use with the greatest amount of customisation is Capture One - I simply imported the Workspace prefs - took about 10 seconds. The Affinity Suite of Apps was similar - copy the Studio Presets. I’m sure most apps would have a p-list file somewhere which would do similar things if it mattered that much.

I’m not suggesting this is the ‘best’ way and not trying to encourage people to do it. I just like being in total control of my machine - but I can see why others might prefer the easy way.

As for the time it took, I’m pretty sure it was well inside 6 or 7 hours - probably closer to 1 or 2 - helped greatly by my pre-emptive implementation of iCloud. I spent a lot of time sorting out 1Password but that was because I wanted to change every password I had - I could have simply imported the old passwords and been up and running in a few seconds but I wanted to completely reassess my security.

1 Like

I this thread you can see my experience with not using Migration Assistant. Surprised by Apple fast delivery promise

This may not apply to you. In addition to what you mentioned, I also copy over the .emacs file and .ssh directory from my home folder. Sometimes I’ll copy over the contents of /usr/local and /opt/local.

If you use your computer as a host for any web-based services, don’t forget /Library/WebServer (for your content) and /private/etc/apache2 (mainly for the httpd.conf file).

I would copy the entire contents of your home directory.

Your Library folder might be problematic. It contains internal per-user data for system features and apps (including sandboxed data for applications from the Mac App Store). The content should be automatically (re-)created when you install/run each app for the first time, but you will lose things like application preferences.

I would copy the Library directory and deal with the possibility that something might break, because I want to keep a lot of the data that’s stored there. For example:

  • Firefox profiles (~/Library/Application Support/Firefox)
  • Microsoft Office settings and templates (~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office)
  • Most application preferences (~/Library/Preferences/…)
  • User keychains (~/Library/Keychains), especially if they’re not synced to iCloud

Applications should see this data and use it (upgrading it if necessary) without incident. This is what happens when you upgrade an app (or macOS itself) in-place on a running system, so it should also happen when the app launches on a new system and finds a copy of its data there.

The downside to migrating all of this is that there may be some applications that choke upon seeing old data. You would have to locate and delete its data in order to recover. I haven’t seen this on my systems, but it’s never safe to assume that every application will always work properly.

The other downside is that there may be cruft leftover from apps you have deleted (or chose to not migrate from the old system), and it won’t go away until you delete it.

1 Like

Here’s a somewhat different issue… I have a 2012 MacBook Pro (w/ 1TB SSD) running 10.14.6 Mojave. It can upgrade as far as Catalina (10.15.7). I’m planning on replacing it with a 14" MacBook Pro or possibly an Air, but definitely some form of M-series. I’ve been upgrading with Migration assistant or its predecessors for ages, and have accrued a lifetime of cruft. I’m also experiencing an annoying, ongoing issue with Suggestd quitting unexpectedly, maybe 10 times a day… " Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInternalInconsistencyException’, reason: ‘Asset identifier storage too small’…terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException"

No noticeable problems with that other than error messages to dismiss. Nothing seems to fix it, including reformatting the drive back to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), installing a clean Mojave and using migration assistant to restore. I’m worried that migrating everything from this machine to Monterrey on a new one could carry that issue forward. I’m also rather intimidated by the idea of a manual migration. Thoughts, anyone?

I used Migration Assistant with Thunderbolt 3 connection between my M1 iMac and old 2017 iMac. I don’t remember the elapsed time but it was just a couple of hours from macOS 11 to same. Smooth migration. Have used same approach with M1 MacBook Airs, also no issues.

1 Like

That does seem to be the fastest and, by far, the simplest.

Is there a reason you haven’t tried updating from Mojave to Catalina to solve the problem? If you do end up using MA (which would certainly be my instinct), you’ll need to (ought to) do that anyway.

There were several 32-bit applications I didn’t want to do without. Recently, one I use a lot was upgraded (finally) to 64-bit, and I’m starting to feel ready to make the leap. I have corresponded with the developer of Etrecheck about the suggestd crash, and he felt it was likely to continue to be a problem without a totally clean install and manual import of my necessary old data on a new Mac :grimacing:
I guess, at this point I could try the Catalina upgrade on this machine and if the problem continues, I’m no worse off than before.

Migration Assistant. You can do it either over wifi or if you have ethernet capability for your new machine over ethernet but I would definitely put the older one on ethernet since it’s got much slower wifi. Alternatively…run Time Machine on the old then shut it down, move the TM drive to new and then use MA to migrate. Alternatively…clone the old one and migrate from the clone.

Using MA to migrate from the old one requires running MA on both computers.

I’ve done them both using MA over wifi and MA from a TM drive…the latter said it was going to take 91 hours for the first couple of hours and still said 91 when I went to bed that evening before being done the next morning. The MA over wifi took a couple of hours (2015 rMBP to M1 Pro MBP) and the TM one was a 2014 Mini with a USB3 (or maybe earlier, can’t remember) 2.5 inch Seagate Backup Plus external 5400 rpm spinner which was it’s TM drive. The mini os crapped out so I nuked the internal and did a recovery to Monterey then MA. It’s pretty slow running Monterey naturally…but it’s just an ethernet connected file server for me and the only thing it does is serve as one of my two network drives for my homegrown TM equivalent solution. TM doesn’t work worth a damn over wifi so I rolled my own solution with CarboyCopyCloner many months ago and that one is pretty bulletproof.

I did the manual migration from El Capitan and a 13 year old Mac Pro to a brand new M1 MacBook Pro (until the new iMac is out). It takes some time but is not that hard. All the iCloud stuff and Contacts, Calendars, passwords etc come over automatically. Transferring documents is easy. Transferring Mail requires some thinking. I copied the old Mail folder over and then imported each of my old Mail boxes. I had a lot of Mail rules. So I opened the new Mail rules plist file, studied how it saved the few existing rules, and then copy pasted the old Mail rules plist content. Don’t forget to fix any path and mail folder names if necessary. Document aliases resolved fine (I was surprised). Transferring Photo library did not work at the first try. I mostly use referenced photos. It found most but not all photos automatically but then never completed Face detection. In the end I just started over and reimported my photos. Transferring Music and TV shows/movies was fine if you keep the location of the files in the correct place, which now is different from Mojave. Apps need to be reinstalled but you want the latest M1 version anyway and I had to contact a few guys to resend me new serial numbers for registration. And you need to find and copy anything special in ~User/Library etc. Overall it took me a week by doing it slowly every day a bit. Backups need to be set up new of course. Keep the old computer around for a while so you can always go back and look for something you forgot to copy over.

1 Like

That sounds hard to me. :)

What was wrong with just migrating using Time Machine? It takes a few hours, is basically complete, and then you’re done with it.

Moving from El Capitan to Monterey is a big step and I did not want to transfer 13 years of accumulated stuff/junk/leftover crap. I wanted a fresh clean install with only the apps I still use.

1 Like

Not trying to be snarky – I am legitimately curious – what is the benefit of getting rid of all that “crap”? Has anyone ever documented it causing any issues?

AFAIK, the OS upgrade will remove any obsolete system software/incompatible extensions, and if there’s an app you don’t use, its preferences and system files won’t interfere with anything. At one time (decades ago) the space they used could be significant, but now it amounts to a few megabytes, which is nothing.

If you just want to be clean and organized, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think there’s any practical advantage except a tiny bit of disk space gained.

I find a clean install way more hassle as it takes me days to set up the “new” system exactly the way I want – so many little settings I forget until I run into them and they annoy me. I don’t see any purpose.

2 Likes

My M1 Max arrived, a college supplied laptop with all that entails in terms of remote management profiles etc. Sigh.

Given that it’s not my machine, I’m not migrating, I’m going to install certain apps only. I’m trying to identify what aspects of my work I can slice off and put on this machine for teaching purposes, a task I am finding difficult I have to say and I suspect a certain amount of creep will be inevitable.

The Geekbench scores show it as about five times faster, single core and multi-core, than my 2019 i7 iMac.

This is not actually true. I just migrated from High Sierra to Monterey in a Macbook Pro Max. Since the old computer was a 2010-vintage Mac Pro, my connection options turned out to be extremely limited (ethernet), so the migration went very slowly. I tried to use Migration Assistant to move everything, wanting to keep my 20+ years of email and files. The settings were transferred using ethernet, but when I checked the data folders, I found that a large amount, around a terabyte, worth of the files hadn’t transferred. Thankfully, I found that the Apple silicon has something akin to Target Disk, so I was able to use USB2 connection, which was faster than ethernet but not by much. I found that a lot of programs were transferred, including a lot that aren’t usable in the new laptop. I ended up upgrading and deleting the ones that I no longer needed or were not upgraded.

Everything that @xdev had to say in the second paragraph is very close to being 100% true. Migration Assistant does attempt to only migrate System software and extensions that are known to be compatible with the new macOS and skip items that are on it’s list of known incompatibilities.

But he said nothing about those 3rd party apps you had to dispose of. That isn’t a function of Migration Assistant in any way. As you found out, that’s up to the user to sort out, either before hand or as you found out after the fact.

There are some tools which make this easier that I would have recommended if I was aware of what you were going to do. I suspect most of the apps that no longer worked were because they were coded as 32-bits, none of which would have worked if you had chosen to stop at Catalina, instead. There are tools that would have alerted you to those. And Application Compatibility Table — RoaringApps is a crowd sourced site that can alert you to apps that are suppose to work, not work or are unknown in a variety of recent OSs.

That’s just it, not all of them were 3rd party apps. I completely expected that the older 3rd party apps wouldn’t work even if they got migrated over, but I was surprised when something like the 2009 edition of iDVD, among a few others, made it across. Don’t misunderstand, the migration of these apps wasn’t really a problem in my eyes. Ultimately, I don’t have many special needs, so the older apps that I cannot use anymore aren’t a major issue. Additionally, since I was migrating from such an out-of-date OS, I wasn’t surprised by any of the problems. That said, the troubling aspect of the transfer was the incomplete transfer of around a terabyte of data from standard folders (Documents, Movies, Music). For some reason, the permissions on the new machine prevented data files from transferring, even though the folders were all properly created. It took a few tries to figure out that there was a permissions issue, and by then I had started doing the transfer manually.

Had I kept up with new OS’s over the years, I’m confident that the migration problems would have been few if any. The MacBook is new and fast, so I’ll be keeping up with them for the foreseeable future.