Moving my partner’s Mac onto my Mac - migration assistant I’m assuming?

[Stoobydoo]

This is likely to be a stupidly simple question or two but I need some assurance before I attempt it. I’m no spring chicken and the brain’s not playing ball.
I have a 2019 27 inch iMac - i9 24G of ram and 520G free on its 1T ssd. It’s fine although I’d like to go down the Mac mini route soon.
However, my partner has a 2019 21.5 iMac with 8G ram and 703G free on a 1T Fusion Drive. It is plagued with problems. The drive I think is dying. Everything is super slow. I did, for a while, have it running off an external ssd. Sadly the ssd failed and I had to recover from Time Machine. My partner does not want to persist with the machine any longer. So the plan is to move her account off her iMac onto mine. Working off one Mac would not be a problem for us. Anyway, my question is, is it just a matter of connecting the iMacs together and using migration assistant to move her account over to my iMac? If that worked and we ended up having two accounts on the one iMac, do we have to run separate Time Machine backups or can we configure it to do a whole machine at a time?
I’d be grateful for any advice. Thank you. Stuart

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

First, ASAP, backup the potentially dying drive with a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper... so you have no dependency on that iMac surviving to & through this migration.

Second, I suggest backing up your own Mac too.

If the Time Machine backup is fresh enough, you CAN use Migration assistant and just do it from that drive.

Else, yes, you can use Migration Assistant to copy the user from the other iMac.

Yes, TM will backup multiple user accounts in a "whole computer" way after the migration. You don't have to do anything different.

If you really do NOT want to merge 2 computers into 1, you could take the failing iMac to a Mac repair shop and have them replace the Fusion Drive with a SSD. That should make it nicely functional again for the remaining life of the device.

When all this is settled, if you don't already have TM set up this way, I suggest adding a SECOND TM drive to the system so you have TWO full TM backups. After both are fresh, eject one and store it in a safe place offsite. Then regularly rotate onsite-offsite drives so that a pretty fresh backup is always offsite. I use a bank safe deposit box and roughly a monthly schedule for this.

WHY??? Fire-flood-theft is likely to take out your iMac AND your TM backup sitting near it at the same time. Only the one offsite is likely to survive such commonplace scenarios.

 

[Stoobydoo]

Many thanks Hobesounddarryl! Good advice regarding the backups. We do have superduper and will start with backups of both. Oh and good advice regarding multiple backup locations.

 

[picpicmac]

So the plan is to move her account off her iMac onto mine. Working off one Mac would not be a problem for us.

So, on your computer are you going to create a new user first?

If you do that, then she can log into the new user, and then use Migration Assistant to move her stuff from her old iMac onto her new user account on your iMac.

BTW, make sure you have a spare account on your machine, that has super-user permissions. You never know when you might need it, if your own account gets messed up.

 

[Stoobydoo]

Hi picpicmac, hmm… honestly, I hadn’t thought about creating an account first. I was going to login as me, fire up migration assistant and the. See if I could get it to pull over my partner’s account.

 

[Fishrrman]

DON'T create "a new account" for her on YOUR Mac first.

Because... when you afterwards use migration assistant... it will STILL bring over her "old" account, and then she will have TWO "dis-similar" accounts to deal with.

How I'd do it:
First, use either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to clone the contents of HER Mac to an external drive.
Now, EVERYTHING is there, in "plain old finder format". You can mount it on YOUR Mac desktop as you would any other drive.

THEN... connect the backup to YOUR Mac.

NOW start up migration assistant.
Give it some time to "digest" everything.

NEXT... migration assistant will present you with "a list" of stuff that can be migrated.
You need to be careful here.

IF... all you really want to do is "bring over" the stuff that's in her account, then you need to UNCHECK EVERYTHING EXCEPT her account.

Then let MA do its job.

When done, you can log out of your account, and let her log into HER account.
Make sure that she "looks around" to be sure things are where they're supposed to be.
Some later-on "final adjustments" will probably be necessary.

This is where the cloned backup can be useful.
It mounts like any other drive, she "knows where stuff is" on it.
Some things that WEREN'T in her user folder may need to be "manually migrated".

You just have to do, what you have to do...

 

[Stoobydoo]

Thank you Fishrrman. That’s a detailed and easy to follow description of what to do.

 

[picpicmac]

DON'T create "a new account" for her on YOUR Mac first.

Because... when you afterwards use migration assistant... it will STILL bring over her "old" account, and then she will have TWO "dis-similar" accounts to deal with.

Granted that can be a problem.

However, I prefer to do it that way, and pick and choose what to bring over.