Can I migrate a mountain lion time machine to a machine that only supports Lion?

[GHicks]

My dad has very kindly agreed to swap his newer imac for my older imac as he only uses basic features. I want to swap all my files and data from my imac to his and vice versa.

We both use time machine and I was hoping I could simply migrate my time machine backup to his imac and his time machine backup to mine.

However, he has Mountain Lion installed on his imac and my machine doesn't have the requirments to upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Would the migration assistant simply revert back to the compatible OS X (in this case Lion) or am I going to encounter problems?

Thanks in advance. Gareth

 

[volcomfever]

My dad has very kindly agreed to swap his newer imac for my older imac as he only uses basic features. I want to swap all my files and data from my imac to his and vice versa.

We both use time machine and I was hoping I could simply migrate my time machine backup to his imac and his time machine backup to mine.

However, he has Mountain Lion installed on his imac and my machine doesn't have the requirments to upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Would the migration assistant simply revert back to the compatible OS X (in this case Lion) or am I going to encounter problems?

Thanks in advance. Gareth

Most likely, you will encounter some problems. For your info, it won't be a problem. TM and migration assistant handle restoring or transferring data to a newer OS pretty easily. However, going from ML to Lion, there might be some issues. It also may work but I don' t think it will be seamless. Your best bet is to do a manual backup (or manually navigate through the TM backups) and do a clean install on the older iMac your dad is going to use and then manually add the data back. The only thing that doesn't do smoothly is 3rd party apps and the data from those apps. If you're not concerned with that, just do the manual backup and a clean install and you should be fine.

 

[comatory]

No