A "staged" migration?

[-hh]

Greetings,

Its been far too long coming, but I'm starting to set up a M1 mini to replace my cheesegrater for my 'day to day' desktop (email, MS-Office, etc).

Things got off to a rough-ish start when I didn't see a particularly feasible way to go from a 512 to a 256 boot drive ... simply too much data in use on the boot drive / user home directory to get it down to under 256.

So what I did was to skip everything except the /user/ directories in Migration Assistant, hoping that I can then find & do enough clean-up to make room for running Migration Assistant a second time for the Applications folder, to pull over the Applications.

What I found was too many GB worth of email, much of which is just spam that I've allowed to accumulate for far too long. I've gone through and recovered ~60GB of free space this way. The other area appears to be 'local' backups of iOS devices ... I'm okay with killing these in the interim. The good news is that I believe I have enough free space to run Migration Assistant a second time to "finish the job"

So the question is ... will I be able to safely run Migration Assistant a second time and pull over just the old system's Apps?

Are there any risks or concerns in doing this (such as MS-Office 2016 overwriting MS-Office 2021)?

FWIW, it doesn't appear that Migration Assistant allows me to choose which Apps to import or not - - I'm assuming that it is an "all or nothing' and then I'll have to delete off old stuff which isn't compatible, or I don't need anymore, etc.


Thanks in advance!

 

[Brian33]

So the question is ... will I be able to safely run Migration Assistant a second time and pull over just the old system's Apps?

I believe that will be fine. Just make sure you un-check all of the other categories within MA.

Are there any risks or concerns in doing this (such as MS-Office 2016 overwriting MS-Office 2021)?

An interesting question. IF they had exactly the same filename, it's plausible that MA would copy the older version and overwrite the newer version on the destination system. On the other hand, it might be smart enough to notice that the destination system's app has a newer date, and decide not to copy that app. I don't know what would happen. Maybe it would stop and ask you. (I'd guess that it would copy ALL apps from the old system to the new system, regardless of date/timestamps.)

In any case, if they have different filenames (e.g., one has 2016 and the other has 2021 in the filename as displayed in Finder), there should be no conflict.

FWIW, it doesn't appear that Migration Assistant allows me to choose which Apps to import or not - - I'm assuming that it is an "all or nothing' and then I'll have to delete off old stuff which isn't compatible, or I don't need anymore, etc.

Yes, it's all or nothing. You could prevent the copying of a particular app by deleting it from the old system before running MA. If you don't want to delete it permanently from the old system, you could probably put them into the trash, run MA, and then right-click them in trash and restore them to the original location (/Applications). Just make sure not to accidentally empty the trash first! I suggest the trash because I'm fairly confident that MA won't copy them from there; I'm not so sure if you just moved them out of /Applications to some other location -- maybe MA would find and copy them?

I have had good experience with MA and it's really useful, but I wish Apple would tell us more about what it will do, either by documenting it or having a "test run" option!

 

[bradl]

I believe that will be fine. Just make sure you un-check all of the other categories within MA.

I don't know if this is a good thing to do. Keep in mind that I am asking the same question as I'll be doing the same with going to a new MBP from a mid-2011 13" MBA. The issue that will come up is that if you bring in all of the Apps from an older, Intel-based Mac, you'd be dependent on Rosetta 2 to run those apps. That would leave the user having to replace all of them to use Silicon-native binaries in a race against time for then Apple drops Rosetta 2 from MacOS. So would it be a good idea at all to bring over of the applications at all unless there is no universal binary or Silicon version of that application?

This is more of a transition question than a Migration Assistant question, because in the end one may be repeating the process of reinstalling newer versions of applications after the software transition off of Intel is complete.

An interesting question. IF they had exactly the same filename, it's plausible that MA would copy the older version and overwrite the newer version on the destination system. On the other hand, it might be smart enough to notice that the destination system's app has a newer date, and decide not to copy that app. I don't know what would happen. Maybe it would stop and ask you. (I'd guess that it would copy ALL apps from the old system to the new system, regardless of date/timestamps.)

In any case, if they have different filenames (e.g., one has 2016 and the other has 2021 in the filename as displayed in Finder), there should be no conflict.

Again, this goes back to the above. If you're going from Intel to Silicon, it may be better to install the Silicon version from a new download versus bringing over the Intel version from Migration Assistant.

Yes, it's all or nothing. You could prevent the copying of a particular app by deleting it from the old system before running MA. If you don't want to delete it permanently from the old system, you could probably put them into the trash, run MA, and then right-click them in trash and restore them to the original location (/Applications). Just make sure not to accidentally empty the trash first! I suggest the trash because I'm fairly confident that MA won't copy them from there; I'm not so sure if you just moved them out of /Applications to some other location -- maybe MA would find and copy them?

I have had good experience with MA and it's really useful, but I wish Apple would tell us more about what it will do, either by documenting it or having a "test run" option!

If using Time Machine for making the backups that Migration Assistant uses, Time Machine does not back up anything that is in the Trash. So you could take a full TM backup of your old Mac, then theoretically move the application to the Trash then create another full TM backup (on a different target), and use that new target as the source for the restore and try the test run from there. However, before doing that, I would also recommend to make a USB install stick of the latest version of Monterey, or whatever version that will go onto that new Mac, so that way you can restore things back to factory in case it doesn't work.

That way, if it fails completely and you can't get the applications back from the trash, you could perform a full reinstall of the latest OS on the new Mac, as well as the OS last used on the old Mac, followed by a TM restore of the old Mac, using the backup that did NOT have the applications in the Trash. That would get you back to the last known full working state.

But as far as going from Intel to Silicon, it may be better to run both Macs in Parallel and install the applications needed as new, because by now there should be Silicon versions of those applications already available, if not universal binaries.

BL.

 

[Fishrrman]

I don't see any problem with using migration assistant to transfer ONLY applications (all the other options unchecked).

Be aware that if you're migrating from a much older Mac, many of the apps may no longer run (either outdated or perhaps even 32-bit apps).
There may be software registration issues as well.

I've done "piecemeal" migrations before.
No problems if you take things a little-at-a-time and take steps to avoid permissions problems between the old and new accounts.

I would think such migrations work best using cloned backups (instead of time machine), as you can copy stuff "with the finder" from the backup drive to the new Mac.