Desperately need some advice - Mojave to Sierra?

[franco265]

Hi I'm hoping someone can help. My daughter has been using a Macbook Pro which is running Mojave. She has been playing Sims, Roadblox and a bunch of other stuff and she has a lot of files and photos on this machine too. The machine isn't working that great and we have an old Macbook Air to give her (which she prefers). The Air is a 2011 model running Sierra.

I made a Timemachine backup and tried to use Migration Assistant to move everything, but the Air doesn't see that backup. There are other Time Machine backups (from our other computers) on the same drive which the air sees, but not the Mojave one. I checked and Mojave isn't compatible with 2011 Airs so I think that is the problem.

Anyone know a way around this? Could I for example downgrade the Macbook Pro? Any smarter ideas maybe?

Your advice will make a little girl happy (and a grown man a hero).

Frank

 

[dickie001x]

Upgrade the Air to High Sierra which will in turn upgrade the Air’s hard drive to APFS format which is what Mojave is running on, then try Migration Assistant again - it should see the backup now.

 

[CoastalOR]

OP: You are correct, the problem is the Mojave Time Machine backup. The Migration Assistant app does not support migration of a newer OS to a older OS.

BTW: The APFS format is not an issue for using Time Machine for migration. Time Machine drives only work formatted for HFS+ because of the hard links.

 

[Fishrrman]

What you could do (and yes, this is more work):

Get an external drive. Hard drive or USB flash drive, doesn't matter.
Format it to HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled).
Copy the files you want to move to the external drive.
Take the external drive to the MacBook Air and copy the files over to it.

Slow, but sometimes "what gets the job done" is... whatever gets the job done.

IF you have permissions problems when you connect to the MacBook Air, do this:
Connect the external drive to the Macbook, let the icon mount, DON'T open it.
Then, click ONE TIME on the icon, and bring up the "get info" box (command-i)
In get info, click the lock at the bottom and enter the password (that is used on the Macbook)
Put a checkmark in "ignore ownership on this volume" (sharing and permissions)
Close get info.

Then you can copy files over, and whatever is copied "falls under the ownership" of the account on the Macbook.