Thanks to everyone who responded on this topic; there were a lot of information provided (on this topic, and in other TidBITs topics) that saved me hours, and in some cases days, of time. It is very much appreciated!
Now that I’ve completed the migration, I wanted to circle back and do a brief report on how it went - particularly touching on the questions I asked initially. Hopefully, some of this might be useful for others making similar migrations in the future.
Overview:
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About 2 months after I posted this, my migration target changed: Instead of migrating my Mac Mini from Mojave to a new macOS version, I accelerated my plans to move to Apple Silicon, and bought an M4 Mac Studio.
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Tried Tahoe on the Mac Studio; like others, I found Liquid Glass difficult and/or unpleasant to navigate on the Mac. (I’m fine with it on iPhones and iPads.) The only other version of macOS that is currently supported on M4 Studio is Sequoia; so that’s what I decided to migrate to.
For the most part, I’ve been quite pleased with it. (I have high hopes for Golden Gate, though.)
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I decided to do the installation from scratch, rather than use Migration Assistant to move things over my files, apps and configuration info from Mojave. I did this primarily because there are so many macOS versions between Mojave and Sequoia, I was leery of subtle problems occurring during the automated migration, and having to track them down to fix them.
I do plan to use Migration Assistant in the future, though. Going forward, I intend to upgrade to new macOS versions on a much more regular basis.
Specific Migration Points of Interest:
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iTunes → Music: After all the worries expressed in my initial posting, this went extremely smoothly.
As @Shamino said above, having the Music app open my old iTunes music library database imported everything into Music — with the exception of 4 music videos (all purchased from the iTunes store, oddly.)
A lot of album artwork didn’t get ported over; solved this by running Doug’s AppleScripts “Tracks Without Embedded Artwork” and “Re-embed Artwork” scripts under iTunes; and then (after deleting all the imported music in the Music library) re-importing from the iTunes database a second time.
Would like to add that, for the most part, I’ve found Music a pretty smooth transition from iTunes. There have been a couple minor (to me) deficiencies, and I find some of the UI design of Music to be ungainly; but I’ve been able to do everything I used to do in iTunes — usually in an identical, or almost-identical way. YMMV.
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USB iPhone/iPad Syncing: iTunes->Finder:
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Music syncing: Again, went absolutely smoothly – no problems.
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Syncing Calendar and Contacts: Ran into the exact same problem with syncing Calendar events between the Mac and my iPhone that @david_blanchard describes earlier in this thread: all-day Calendar events transferred from Mac to iPhone changed to span 2 days on the iPhone.
I took David’s suggestion and got SyncMate, and use it to sync Calendar and Contacts — works perfectly. Thank you, David!!
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Migrating Contacts data from Mojave to Sequoia:
- Note: need to export Contact data on Mojave as a Vcard. If exported as a Contacts archive (.abbu extension), would not import on Sequoia.
- Also, Contact Groups were not imported. Luckily, I had only 2, and they were easy to recreate.
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Migrating Calendar data from Mojave to Sequoia: Probably the biggest pain-in-the-ass of the entire process. Not the Mojave Export/Sequoia Import process itself — that went smoothly.
The problem is that Calendar Notifications did not work for most all-day events — very similar to what’s described in this TidBITS thread. Have done several things to improve the situation, but they not completely fix it; if anyone’s interested, I’ll go into more detail on that thread.
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Dead end on migrating 1Password 7 to Sequoia / switching to 1Password 8:
- I was able to get 1Password 7 to install and run on Sequoia. But the attempts to import my 1Password 7 vault (.opvault extension) were disastrous.
- After importing the vault, the count of 1Password items was 903 — 50 less than what it was under Mojave. And then, after selecting “Quit 1Password Completely” and starting again, the item count changed to 947! Repeated quit/restarts had the totals ping-ponging between these 2 totals.
- At this point, I had no confidence in 1Password7 under Sequoia — my 1Password7 data is critical to me, and wasn’t worth the effort of trying to sticking with 1Password 7. So I created a 1Password account and migrated to 1Password 8.
- That in itself presented problems (had to migrate the vault from 1Password7 on my iPad, because all of the browsers I had on Mojave were too old to access my 1Password online account); but the data migrated over perfectly (except for transition from folders to tags, which took some cleanup).
- And in general, I’ve found 1Password 8 easier to use on my Mac than 1Password 7 — though it definitely has deficiencies (e.g., the “Search/Find” distinction in the UI is really opaque). And I’ve found that locating 1Password 8 documentation on features that aren’t basic, “getting started with 1Password 8” features to be difficult to track down.
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Installing Office 2016 on Sequoia: Honestly, amazed that this worked. Had to go to my Microsoft account and download a later version of Office 2016, along with a new license key. But it runs fine on Sequoia, thanks to Rosetta 2 (outside of a few refresh issues when scrolling).
That said, am committing to making a concentrated effort to switch to LibreOffice over the next year.
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Finally: Thank God for Carbon Copy Cloner. I made snapshot backups through the entire migration, so that when I’d run into a problem and/or dead end, I’d just restore to the previous snapshot and start over. An absolutely reliable and rock-solid app – I love it.
[Edited: Changed “Apple Music” → “Music”, as recommended by @Shamino]