Thanks for the reply. The Mini was on Mojave. She only uses the MacOs apps so we made sure that iCloud had all her documents and photos stored and were delighted that very soon after going through setup they were all on the new iMac along with Safari bookmarks, keychain data etc.. All we had to do after was set up her one and only email account.
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Moving from Old Mac to a Newer Mac?
- Thread starter everson38
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Unless I have it wrong, Migration Assistant is used to migrate your data from, say, a Time Machine to a new Mac.
After you do this and boot up, the series of windows you are led through is called the Setup Assistant.
E.g., to fix a major screwup, I booted up in Recovery Mode, erased my Macintosh HD, and reinstalled the macOS. When the mac rebooted, the steps I had to walk through was called the Setup Assistant.
This video does a decent job of explaining the Setup Assistant:
After you do this and boot up, the series of windows you are led through is called the Setup Assistant.
E.g., to fix a major screwup, I booted up in Recovery Mode, erased my Macintosh HD, and reinstalled the macOS. When the mac rebooted, the steps I had to walk through was called the Setup Assistant.
This video does a decent job of explaining the Setup Assistant:
Setup Assistant launches when you start up a new mac or boot a used mac that doesn't have a user profile. As part of the setup process, it asks if you'd like to migrate data and gives you the option to choose the source of the data and the kinds of data you want to migrate such as Apps-Documents-System Settings-etc. This part of the Setup Assistant employs the app Migration Assistant located in your Utilities folder. Just choose them all and allow it to proceed. Migration Assistant can also be run separately from the Setup Assistant.
Ahhh I see. Thank you.
Also, I keep reading to do this, just connect both Macs to the same wifi and then proceed. But I found one person who said to never use wifi because it's slow and almost always fails. He said to just connect an external with the latest Time Machine backup on it, before the first boot, and proceed from there using SA. Is this what you would do?
That person was correct. It is ridiculously slow.
Do a last-minute backup of the old mac to Time Machine. Connect that Time Machine backup to the new Mac and run Migration Assistant from the Applications Folder. Done it dozens of time.
Do a last-minute backup of the old mac to Time Machine. Connect that Time Machine backup to the new Mac and run Migration Assistant from the Applications Folder. Done it dozens of time.