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Migration cable to new RMBP from 2011 MBP?

L

likegadgets

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 22, 2008
790
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US
In the past I migrated to new MBPs using a FireWire cable from MBP to MBP, as soon as I turn the new MBP on.

Since the new RMBP does not have FireWire (and the thunderbolt adapter is not out yet), how would it be best to achieve this?

1) Since I will migrate from a 2011 that has thunderbolt, would a thunderbolt to thunderbolt cable work?

2) USB would be awfully slow (USB 2 on the 2011 MBP)

3) or just connect both via Ethernet cable to the router (the RMBP would need the thunderbolt to etehrnet adapter, which I beleive needs an update to OSX first.

Thanks
 
unless you want to buy an adapter it looks like USB 2.0 to USB 2.0 would be your best bet...
 
Ethernet adaptor would be a good way to do it. I did a 450GB migration between Macs in just over 2 hours last weekend just by connecting a cheap cable between the two. Try that over WiFi and it will take forever :)
 
Do you have Time Machine backups on an external drive?

If so, you can use that with the Migration Assistant instead. It will work the same way; you're just going to point the Migration Assistant to the external backup instead of the other Mac.

If you don't do Time Machine backups on an external drive, now may be the time to start doing so, especially since the new rMBP's are flash and the drive cannot be simply removed and put into an external case like you could on previous gen MBP's with SATA drives.
 
Thank you all for the replies.

My rMBP is still in process (ordered one with 768GB and has not shipped) . I did order the thunderbolt to Ethernet (I travel often and some hotels still need wired connections). I also just ordered the Thunderbolt cable. I will use it for the transfer and later to connect to an external TB drive.
 
Has anyone done thunderbolt in disk mode? I've heard it's actually not very fast.
 
blueicedj said:
unless you want to buy an adapter it looks like USB 2.0 to USB 2.0 would be your best bet...
Click to expand...
theoretically USB 2 is faster than 802.11n ... but if you have a 5GHz 802.11n wifi set up, it'll probably have a sustained transfer rate faster than USB 2. USB 2 rates you see (like 480mbps) are burst rates and sustain rates are usually half or less than half of that. Many methods will be faster than USB 2

steve-p said:
Ethernet adaptor would be a good way to do it. I did a 450GB migration between Macs in just over 2 hours last weekend just by connecting a cheap cable between the two. Try that over WiFi and it will take forever :)
Click to expand...
I did a Migration of around 400GB of data from a USB 3 Time Machine backup drive, and it took about an hour.
 
cmChimera said:
Has anyone done thunderbolt in disk mode? I've heard it's actually not very fast.
Click to expand...

From my SSD 15" MBP TO THE 2012 MBA the target disk via Tbolt took about 20 mins for just shy of 100gigs. Using the Pegasus R4 as storage in a 4 disk raid array is insanely fast. Every experience I've had with Tbolt has been amazing.
 
Great! Good to know. The retina MacBook pro is gonna be my first Mac with thunderbolt, and my girlfriend has a 13" with thunderbolt. We transfer large amounts of files pretty frequently so it's good to know we can do that much faster now.
 
you don't need a router to do it via ethernet, and you don't even need target disc mode, just turn them both on and move things manually, but I think if you are using Migration Assistant go with TB it will be much faster than Ethernet anyway
 
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