migrate from old MBP to new MBP via Target Disk mode?

[jk73]

As detailed in a thread in the Big Sur forum, I have a late 2016 MBP with Touch Bar that worked great until last night, when I experienced a sudden “your system is out of memory” crash while using Safari. After Safari quit, my system was working fine, but I noticed about 15 GB of space had disappeared, so I decided to restart the MBP.

Much to my dismay, the MBP then got stuck in a reboot loop, with booting failing at about the 20% mark and a “your computer restarted because a problem occurred” message appearing over and over. The machine won’t boot into Safe Mode but will boot into Recovery Mode. Disk First Aid fails on Macintosh HD with what looks like a corrupted file system error.

Assuming my MBP’s SSD isn’t fried to the point that even Target Disk mode won’t work, is it possible to migrate my data to a new MBP via Target Disk mode, including system preferences, etc.? I know migrating my own data should be simple, but I’m hoping not to need to set up every system preference panel, etc., from scratch. Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

It will probably work.

If it was me, I'd get ahold of an external drive ASAP.
Then I'd use CarbonCopyCloner (free to download and use for 30 days) to "clone" the contents of the 2016 to the external drive.

This will make the migration (using Setup Assistant the very first time you boot up the new MBP) easy.

 

[jk73]

It will probably work.

If it was me, I'd get ahold of an external drive ASAP.
Then I'd use CarbonCopyCloner (free to download and use for 30 days) to "clone" the contents of the 2016 to the external drive.

This will make the migration (using Setup Assistant the very first time you boot up the new MBP) easy.

Thanks for the suggestion. Do you happen to know if CarbonCopyCloner allows the disk to be cloned in segments or do I need an external HD big enough to copy my MBP‘s entire HD at the same time? Thanks again.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Do you happen to know if CarbonCopyCloner allows the disk to be cloned in segments or do I need an external HD big enough to copy my MBP‘s entire HD at the same time?"

CCC is going to want an external drive that's large enough to hold all the data on your source drive.

How large is the internal drive you currently have?
How much of it (in gb) is currently used?

 

[jk73]

Thanks. It’s 512 GB with about 450 GB of data I want to recover.

 

[jk73]

"Do you happen to know if CarbonCopyCloner allows the disk to be cloned in segments or do I need an external HD big enough to copy my MBP‘s entire HD at the same time?"

CCC is going to want an external drive that's large enough to hold all the data on your source drive.

How large is the internal drive you currently have?
How much of it (in gb) is currently used?

Thanks for the reply.

I have a 512 GB HD in the MBP and it’s almost full, so I’d buy a 1 TB external HD for this project.

Do you know for sure if CarbonCopyCloner works in Recovery Mode in Big Sur? That is, if I buy a 1 TB external HD, format it with a bootable CCC/Big Sur disk image, and then boot my old MBP from this new external HD, should CCC be able to see my files and create a backup? I was able to install Disk Drill via Terminal and it was quickly able to see all of my files, so I assume CCC would be able to, but I‘m not sure. (I didn’t try to recover via Disk Drill because I need a big enough external HD, which I can buy today.) Thanks.

 

[jk73]

Updating the above, CCC apparently doesn’t work in Recovery Mode in Big Sur, but I bought a 2 TB external HD, installed Big Sur on it, booted my ailing MBP from it, and then CCC copied the entire MBP (450 GB), except for six photos that had been corrupted, like a champ. Awesome app.