Mac migration between El Capitan & Sierra

srichards

srichards

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My current imac is dying a death. I need to move everything to the new one. That will be running Sierra.

What's the best way of doing this that won't involve losing lots of things?

I don't use mac mail or Safari so I need to make absolutely sure Thunderbird & firefox keep all their profile information.

I have online back up of everything but it is slow. I was intending using the migration assistant. Does that actually work ok?

I've got an external HDD coming tomorrow so I thought if I backed up everything via time machine would it be possible to restore data and settings via that or does that restore back to the original machine (pretty dumb if it does) would that by kyboshed by the difference in OS?

Can I do a migration by sending everything I need from the old mac to an HDD then plugging that in to the new mac? That would be the easiest as it then means not having two computers set up. The new mac comes with daft wireless mouse and keyboard so I'll be continuing with the old wired keyboard and mouse.

Last time I needed to move the old mac died before the new one arrived so I had to restore from idrive. It took ages but as far as I know I got everything back.

Just checked the idrive back up and the damn thing is near empty. It's screwed up and deleted tons of data. This is the nightmare scenario now. It's missing 200gB and there is no way I can get that uploaded with VM's stupid upload throttling.

Aaarrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

I like to know from those that have done these things which pitfalls there are as I don't have the time to fall in them myself.

I was planning on copying the large but possibly already in the cloud Pictures and Music folders to the HDD but again I don't know whether I'll encounter some itunes related nonsense that will decide I can't use it.
 
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Brilliant. Thanks. That's just the sort of info I was looking for :thumbs:
 
Did the time capsule backup. Migration won't allow using it as they're different versions well, dur. That's what happens when you change macs I can only hope new mac isn't on El Capitan for some reason and that's why. There's no excuse as you can upgrade on the same mac so it can easily apply the update method to that data and make it work.

Started set up last night. No progress bar. It's still sitting there claiming it's setting up this morning. Don't know if it's working or not as there is no progress bar. What a totally crap way of implementing it!

Gave up and hit the power button. Then it started up. New mac is on Yosemite! Looks like refurb store leave them on whatever geriatric OS they had originally.

Really wish I hadn't turned on two step login. God what a hassle.
 
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Apple do say the the "New" mac should be on the latest software, before using Migration assistant. So upgrading to Sierra is the first thing to do. I've use Migration assistant several times and it works fine. But then it has been like for like as far as OS is concerned.
 
My preferred method was to make 2 copies of a time machine back up. One is kept to restore if needed, the other used to transfer to the new machine with a different version of OSX. I make 2 because the first time I did a restore to a later version of OSX it changed the TM backup so that I could not use it to go back to an earlier version, and I lost some data when I had to go back. For really critical stuff I also manually located and copied files (which is why I didn't lose everything after my TM backup being spoiled). Go & find your Thunderbird and FF data files (IIRC OSX actually hides them, requiring unlocking to give you access) and anything else important & manually save them in a plain, un-scrambled way that you can simply move over if TM/other restoration processes lets you down.

Hope you get everything transfered across OK.
 
Funnily enough copying Firefox and thunderbird profiles into iCloud was the first thing I did :)

Old mac still works. If I turn most things off and have the fans up then it is ok so I can probably start it up if I have to.

I haven't had an issue with an upgrade yet. I've done loads. Just about every mac I've owned has several. I never upgrade to a new version within the first few months though. Gives them time to iron out all the cock ups!

It has taken several goes to do all the things it wanted to update. Doing an update all seemed to miss many of them.

Currently updating to sierra. I'm hoping the migration assistant will do a decent job or I'll be having to piece things back together.
 
I found out how a time machine back up could get locked on the new version. When you plug in drive with it on it asked whether you want to use it for back up. If you click yes I assume it over writes stuff. I clicked no as I'm hoping that should leave it untouched if I need to go back to it again.

Finally got to the point where I can even start the migration assistant :)
 
srichards said:
I found out how a time machine back up could get locked on the new version. When you plug in drive with it on it asked whether you want to use it for back up. If you click yes I assume it over writes stuff. I clicked no as I'm hoping that should leave it untouched if I need to go back to it again.

Finally got to the point where I can even start the migration assistant :)
Click to expand...

When I migrated from 10.5 to 10.6, Snow Leopard had been out more than 6 months, but it was still buggy, with a fault that prevented my printing and a few other workflow issues that were a step back from the previous version. I was asked if I wanted to restore my data from the time machine backup on the HDD that I'd used, and it then converted the backup so that it couldn't be used to restore back to 10.5. At one time Apple had a policy to discourage going back to earlier versions, and this seemed to be an aspect of that.

Hopefully all will be well with your new machine.
 
Let's hope so. It's come back kind of how it was. Not sure I like having all docs and downloads defaulting to icloud but we'll see...

They do do some show stopping numpty things sometimes.
 
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