Migration Assistant - files transferred, but can't see them

[johngordon]

I had been trying to transfer everything from a Time Capsule (only a few month old) to a new iMac, but it seemed to get stuck near the end when it was transferring the applications.

I risked it, and quit to see if anything had transferred - sure enough when I booted up the users from the old machine appeared on the login screen and I was able to login with my main user.

It also looks as though all the files have copied across, as the finder is reporting the disk about half full - just what I would have expected.

Trouble is, I can't see them anywhere.

If I Get Info for the HD, it reports around 500GB free out of 1TB, which sounds about right.

Within that, I have four folders with the following sizes showing in Get Info:

Applications - 8.5GB
Library - 5.6GB
System - 8.4GB
Users - 14.7GB

Which obviously doesn't add up to anywhere near the 500GB.

Any ideas what's going on or where all this stuff has gone?

If I start the migration assistant again, but uncheck the applications and do those manually, will it overwrite the 500GB of stuff that seems to be somewhere?

 

[hallux]

If you're doing a full migration, Migration Assistant likely created a new user account on the new Mac to match the one from your old Mac, down to the password used to access it. If you open MacintoshHD (or whatever you named the storage) and look in Users, you should see a folder for each account, you may now have multiples.

 

[johngordon]

What happened was a I created a new user on the new Mac first which was the same as the one on the old Mac.

When I ran MA, it asked me if I wanted to replace the one on the new Mac with the one from the old Mac, and I said yes.

I just rebooted the new Mac, and the disk as gone back down to virtually empty - so it looks like the files aren't there after all.

So I have now deleted the user with the same name, created a new temp admin user, and am about to try the MA again, but this time I'll deselect the Applications as that's where it seemed to get stuck.

And I'll give it longer this time as its 6pm here now, so it if it does take more than few hours, I'll leave it overnight and see where it gets to.

Right - going back in!