Thanks for your input, but I was specifically responding to the claim that "The fastest way to use migration assistant to move from and old Mac to new is to: create a CLONED backup of the old Mac..." which is untrue.
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How Long Does It Take To Transfe Files From One Mac To Another Using Migration Assistant?
- Thread starter beeinformed
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No, it is true.
All years, 2 decades now,
I migrate from my older mbp to the new one,
putting migration assistant, to take all data from a cloned disk made with 'superduper', an identical copy, to an external hard disk.
Migration assistant finds all the appropriate data there.
In a couple of hours, I have my older setup/personalized environment/files/apps etc from the older mac, to the new one.
Yes, I'm very familiar with the process. I've done it many times myself exactly as you describe. It's a great method and highly recommended, and as I also wrote above, gives you an extra backup copy of your data.
Still not as fast as connecting Mac to Mac with a fast cable and running Migration Assistant that way.
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I never thought of connecting to devices together,
why would i want to import from external disk using CCC if Migration Assistant does that same?
I am willing MA wil migrate preferences (date format, icon size, etc etc) which I doubt CCC will
You're going to want to use Migration Assistant no matter what, if you want your new Mac to have everything the old one had. Cloning your old drive using CCC and then cloning that onto the new one, like we did on older Macs, doesn't really work anymore AFAIK.
Anyway, using Migration Assistant it doesn't matter really whether the source is a CCC backup, a Time Machine backup, or a connection between Macs -- but the latter method is fastest if you can get a good connection speed.
Yeah, all that will come through using Migration Assistant. In my experience, the new machine ends up pretty much exactly like the old one -- all the preferences, settings, etc. The only things you have to go through and set up again are things like Apple Pay and TouchID, and signing into iCloud again on the new Mac. There's gonna be some time where Spotlight rebuilds its indexes and other apps get reoriented with regard to syncing, but really it's a very seamless process.
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Did this week with my new mac, the time estimate was in the "hours" range and I realized I was on my home wifi...restarted with just TB cable and 30 minutes later or so, was all done migrating. +1 for using a wired connection!
I'm in the process of transferring my wife's MBP to a new MBP (daughter cracked her screen, used as an opportunity to upgrade).
Migration Assistant is reporting 23 hours using a Thunderbolt cable. I was going to connect it to ethernet with a 10G adapter until I read your post. I forgot Thunderbolt was capable of such speeds!
I didn't restart mine. I just plugged in the Thunderbolt cable and it detected it. Seems to have switched over automatically.
That makes sense it would select the faster method automatically. I'm glad that decisionmaking was programmed in! At the time I was unfamiliar with how MA would handle a WiFi and TB connection, so I restarted MA just to make sure.
It actually finished very quickly. My wife has about 800GB of data. It was over with in less than 3 hours.
FWIW, I recently migrated approximately 700GB from a 2020 i7 Intel MBP to my new M5 MBP using Migration Assistant over a peer-to-peer USB cable connection. I didn't time it, but it was fast, around 15 minutes, with no issues other than the need to update a couple of apps for Silicon. Before migrating, I made a CCC backup, just in case.
When I upgraded to my current MBP, I copied my Downloads and Documents folders and other data I needed to bring over to an external SSD. The total time for copying to the SSD and then transferring to the new MBP was less than 30 minutes for well over 500GB of data, a lot of which was video files I had been editing.
You really need to know what you're doing tomake sure you get everything, and you need to redo preferences etc.
Yeah, migration can be slow but at least in most cases your new computer is basically the "same" as your old one in terms of configuration, file location, etc.
Doing it this way makes sure installs are clean and back to where they should be. Everything works and is where it should. I keep all my files on iCloud anyways, the only thing I have are programs on my internal HD. Photos are on an External HD along with Time Machine Backups.
This way, if there was say an issue with the local account, I'm starting over. Is it a bit extreme than not just making a new local? Depends on what I had to format and do. Or in this case moving to a new machine. It's much quicker and easier to do it my way. While you're waiting how ever long, I'm already in my new system and have programs dragged over and copied, running and working on my new mac.
keeping your files in icloud is not faster, it will take a looong time to get those 1GB files then re uploading them. I am not sure if clicking and dragging app icons to new computer installs them correctly.
I didn't say it was faster at all. Everyone is different as to what they do. And yes it installs them correctly as I've been doing this since OS X Tiger.
I keep documents and such. If it's anything I'm working on currently if it's a larger file of course I'd keep it on the internal drive.
Not being a creator of anything currently I don't have to worry about any of that.