Migration assistant woes

[c1000]

I'm trying to migrate everything from my 3 year old Macbook Air to a new MBA. Don't have a thunderbolt cable (and neither machine has ethernet port), so I opted to do this over WiFi, only to find it quoted me 100+ hours! I know WiFi is slow, but this seems absurd and obviously won't do, as I'm leaving for a 2-week vacation in a day's time and was planning to bring my new laptop along. What are my alternatives here? Do I need to buy a thunderbolt cable just for this one-time migration? Can I do it with a USB cable connecting the 2 machines, or a USB cable to external hard disk w/ Time Machine backup?

Another question, after I complete the migration to my new laptop, can it be backed up to my pre-existing Time Machine profile on the external hard disk? Also, will the process overwrite the newer version of MS Office I've already installed on the new machine, with the old version on the source laptop?

 

[Weaselboy]

USB to USB won't work. In your case, the best would be to use a current Time Machine backup on an external disk to Migrate from.

It can use your existing Time Machine backup to just continue backups from the new machine. If you have already installed MS Office the migration will not overwrite it.

One caveat though. It sounds like you may have already setup an account on the new machine? If you did and it is the same name as the account you are bringing in with Migration Assistant that will cause duplicates and all sorts of problems. If you already made an account of the same name, just add a new temp account then login to the temp account and delete your account then run the Migration Assistant.