Migration Assistant Stalled. Now what?

[padams35]

I'm gifting my old 2015 MBA to a new user who hasn't used a mac in two years. I've erased the system and installed a clean copy of Monterey, but when trying to set it up for them using their old (MacOS Sierra) Time Machine backup the transfer stalled at 95% complete.

I've been staring at "Transferred 22456 files. About X minutes remaining at 48.9 MB/s" for the past hour. About every 15 minutes the estimated time ticks up by one minute with the file count remaining unchanged. When I first noticed it stalled it claimed 10 minutes remaining. Then 11. Then 12... 13... 14....


If I hit 'cancel' what happens?
It resumes where it left off? I can log in the user with 95% data transferred, 5% data lost? All transferred data gets deleted and I have to start over from scratch?

If the hitting 'cancel' would loose all progress, then could I interrupt the process by either hot disconnecting the timemachine backup or holding the power button for a forced shutdown?


Advise?

 

[chabig]

It's so tempting to cancel, but I discourage it. It's very hard for the software to provide an accurate prediction of time remaining. I would recommend waiting at least overnight. Keep the machine plugged in and go to bed. You might be surprised in the morning.

 

[padams35]

Two hours, and the blinky LED on the timemachine HDD is not blinking either.

Hit 'Cancel' for science. No obvious data migration had occured, but the disk space was clearly being used by something. Migration assistant wanted to delete the user and transfer fresh, but after a little poking I eventually found the incomplete data in /private/var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6sfxvn_n0000000000000/Cleanup At Startup/SMSandboxTools-tmp/Users/<username>.

I'm going to try a copy/paste back into the correct user directory and then see if I can figure out what is missing/broken.

 

[chabig]

I’m glad to know that cancelling didn’t cause any problem. Good luck. I’m sure you’ll get it.