Migration Assistant Not Enough Space

[akpasta]

Hi Folks,

Santa brought me a brand new 2018 Macbook Air yesterday. This replaces a 2010 2.4ghz Macbook that is running 10.7.5 Lion and a hard drive with 500gb capacity that is about half full. The flash hard drive on the new Macbook Air has only 120gb of space.

When I connected an external drive with my Time Machine backup to the new Air, Migration Assistant informs me there it not enough space to copy everything.

I'm now trying to figure out the best course of action. It doesn't seem to allow you to bring some photos, some music, some apps, etc. It's all or nothing.

Can someone offer some advice for migrating data another way?

 

[chabig]

Get an external drive and take about 150GB of your data off the 2010 machine. Then you can migrate and attach the external to your new machine. Both iTunes and the Photos app can keep their libraries on external media. Other data might be best stored on a cloud service, like iCloud, Dropbox, or the like. It's an easy internet search, but here are two links I found quickly.

https://www.imore.com/how-move-your-itunes-library-external-hard-drive
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/02/08/how-to-move-photos-library-to-external-drive/

 

[Howard2k]

You can also bypass Migration Assistant.

Ensure TM is turned off, connect the drive, and then open Time Machine. You can either add TM in Sys Prefs, or you can (IIRC) Opt-click when opening TM. You don't have to do a TM or MA restore to pull the files.