Best way to move user from one MacBook to another

[bigjnyc]

Hey guys so here is the situation, my wife has a 2014 MacBook Air which we are selling... I have a 2017 MacBook 12” which we are going to share for a little while until the next MacBook pros come out.

The question is what is the quickest most painless way to move her over to my MacBook creating her own account. So moving all her files, etc. Would be nice if I could move all settings but I can go through and do that manually if need be. For photos she uses iCloud photo so that should be easy as logging in. So basically it’s the files and settings for the most part.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Hey guys so here is the situation, my wife has a 2014 MacBook Air which we are selling... I have a 2017 MacBook 12” which we are going to share for a little while until the next MacBook pros come out.

The question is what is the quickest most painless way to move her over to my MacBook creating her own account. So moving all her files, etc. Would be nice if I could move all settings but I can go through and do that manually if need be. For photos she uses iCloud photo so that should be easy as logging in. So basically it’s the files and settings for the most part.

1. Clone the MacBook Air internal drive to an external HD, with Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper!
2. Connect the external HD to the your MacBook.
3. Start the Migration Assistant app from Utilities and use it to migrate just her user account.

Alternative to 1.and 2. would be to connect her MBA to your MacBook by Target Disk Mode.

 

[bigjnyc]

1. Clone the MacBook Air internal drive to an external HD, with Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper!
2. Connect the external HD to the your MacBook.
3. Start the Migration Assistant app from Utilities and use it to migrate just her user account.

Alternative to 1.and 2. would be to connect her MBA to your MacBook by Target Disk Mode.

awesome thanks!

Do you know if the 30 day free trial of CCC is limited in any way or is it fully open?

 

[BrianBaughn]

awesome thanks!

Do you know if the 30 day free trial of CCC is limited in any way or is it fully open?

CCC works 100% during the trial.

 

[Rivvvers]

Its also a better idea to clone the MacBook internal drive to a compressed read only dmg image which you can locate on the external drive, then you can copy it multiple times to what ever drive, mount it to the desktop and drag the relevant files and folders out as you restore it, also you won't accidentally modify or delete any files inside the image because it is read only.

 

[bigjnyc]

Its also a better idea to clone the MacBook internal drive to a compressed read only dmg image which you can locate on the external drive, then you can copy it multiple times to what ever drive, mount it to the desktop and drag the relevant files and folders out as you restore it, also you won't accidentally modify or delete any files inside the image because it is read only.

Great tip, thank you!