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How do you migrate?

A

apple-pride

macrumors member
Original poster
How can I transfer all of the data from my MacBook Air to a new MacBook Pro of I want to switch laptops?
 
Do a Time Machine backup of your current Mac on an external USB disk. Plug the disk into your new Mac. Turn it on. Answer a few quick questions. Come back later, the new machine is configured exactly like your old one, same arrangement of desktop icons, everything.

This has worked almost flawlessly for me when moving to a 2011 MBA and now a 2013 MBA.
 
If you have the ethernet to USB adapter, use ethernet with Migration Assistant...much faster. Also, unless you are restoring from an Air to an Air, you will not be able to use a MBP TM backup to restore a MBA (at least I wasn't able to).
 
IIRC, you can use wifi and Migration assistant, but if you are transferring more than a couple of gb's, it will take a while.
 
Migration Assistant and Target Disk Mode. You just need a CAT6 cable aka gigabit ethernet cable, Thunderbolt cable, or USB cable between the two systems and you can migrate from one system to another with no loss and selective restore.
 
apple-pride said:
So I have to buy something? :/

I was hoping for a cloud based solution. :/
Click to expand...

Like Ron said... if both systems are on the same wifi network you can transfer everything over using Migration Assistant. Depending on how much personal data you have to move over though, this can be somewhat slow. If it is just a few GB it won't be too bad.

Run the below command in Terminal and it will show the amount of data in the user space you need to move over.

Code: 
du -sh /Users/
 
I used Migration Assistant and moved 90GB in three hours when I set up a new MBA last year. Definitely not the end of the world... Otherwise you need two MDP to Ethernet adapters - 1 for each machine.
 
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