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Migration Assistant... 32 hours... REALLY??
- Thread starter FogCityMac
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It's mid-March and I am just getting up the courage to migrate from my Dell laptop PC to my new MacBook Pro I received for Christmas. I knew the task would be agonizing thus the stall. I found this post after stepping through the migration wizard and starting the migration of my data over my home ATT wifi. 33 hours and 27 minutes was the original estimate for migrating 30GB of data. After about 20 minutes, I'm now down to 15 hours 52 minutes bobbling up and down slightly as the blue bar creeps along. I don't have an Ethernet connection cable so I will just wait this out and hope things pick up the pace.
If you are coming from Snow Leopard to Yosemite it would take quite a while as that was 3 OS's ago.....
Down to 25 hours from 52 since Yesterday. Hmm, can I use FireWire from a Time Capsule to restore to my iMac? I thought I had to do this via crappy WiFi.
So a couple of things as I'm in the middle of doing precisely this...
1) If you cancel and then restart, say half-way, Migration Assistant will already have created your account. It will therefore highlight a conflict. It then lets you choose if you want to keep both accounts or if you want to move the first one to 'deleted users'. What it will not do is to overwrite the files
2) My backup drive is attached to a time capsule. Post-cancellation I tried to connect the drive (USB3) directly to the computer. Doesn't work. Somehow it *needs* to go through the time machine. No clue why. Tried everything (mounting the disk image etc.)
3) When I resumed I switched off wifi on the lap top and ensured that the Time Capsule was also off wireless. Then connected ethernet both sides (directly to the TC, not going through the LAN). And the speed was... exactly as before
although the estimated time dropped from 30+ hours to about 20.
Go figure...
1) If you cancel and then restart, say half-way, Migration Assistant will already have created your account. It will therefore highlight a conflict. It then lets you choose if you want to keep both accounts or if you want to move the first one to 'deleted users'. What it will not do is to overwrite the files
2) My backup drive is attached to a time capsule. Post-cancellation I tried to connect the drive (USB3) directly to the computer. Doesn't work. Somehow it *needs* to go through the time machine. No clue why. Tried everything (mounting the disk image etc.)
3) When I resumed I switched off wifi on the lap top and ensured that the Time Capsule was also off wireless. Then connected ethernet both sides (directly to the TC, not going through the LAN). And the speed was... exactly as before
although the estimated time dropped from 30+ hours to about 20.Go figure...
Ugh . . . went to bed with it showing 6 hours+ (which was what it said shortly after it got started). Woke up 8 hours later and it said 16h remaining ! At least the blue bar had moved. Oddly, it no longer showed the transfer speed (wired GigE)
I finally sorted it out! By connecting a fast drive directly to the machine (and more crucially) getting it to recognise both the drive and the old backup...
Connect the drive directly to your computer
STOP time machine in the prefs
Choose the drive in the prefs
Restart TM
At this point the backup preparation will take quite some time as it compares all the files but once this is done, the backup itself will be very quick.
If you then to reinstall the drive elsewhere, follow the steps as above.