Upgrading from 2012 MBA to 2020 MBA...

[hooper2]

I've been holding out on updating to Catalina on my 2012 MBA. Which has been fine. But with a new computer coming that is on Catalina, should I upgrade my MBA to Catalina before doing the migration assistant? Any benefits one way or the other?

Thanks!

 

[Taz Mangus]

You should be fine migrating from TimeMachine backup. I don’t think you necessarily need to upgrade your 2012 MBA to Catalina first.

 

[deeddawg]

I set up my 2020 MBA from a Mojave TM backup of my 2015 rMB. Worked fine.

No need to update the 2012 MBA IMHO.

I would suggest to force a fresh full TimeMachine backup of the 2012. Also be aware the migration assistant can be slow with external HDDs. Took several hours and I had to have faith that it was still working when it showed the same progress screen with no movement for an hour or so at a time. Probably would've been faster had I used an external SSD but saw no reason to spend the money on one for just this occasion.

 

[hooper2]

Are there any other ways to do migration assistant besides TM?

 

[Daverich4]

Are there any other ways to do migration assistant besides TM?

You can connect the computers together directly.

Transfer to a new Mac with Migration Assistant - Apple Support

Use Migration Assistant to copy your files from another computer.

support.apple.com

 

[Camarillo Brillo]

Doesn’t iCloud cover most of the stuff you need to migrate over?

I like to keep my new computers fresh and just copy the files I want over via an external hard drive. I don’t like to copy all of my settings and accumulated crap from the old computer via time machine. That’s just me though not a big fan of time machine anyway.

 

[Boyd01]

Are there any other ways to do migration assistant besides TM?

I use a Carbon Copy clone when moving to a new machine. I installed Catalina on the internal 256gb SSD of my 2012 quad-core Mini Server recently, just to check it out (normally I boot that machine from an external 1tb SSD with Sierra). For testing purposes, a couple days ago I used Migration Assistant with a Carbon Copy clone of my 2013 MacBook Air that is running Sierra. The clone was on a 500gb external Samsung T3 USB 3.0 SSD and I was surprised by how fast the process went.

From what I've seen so far, there are no problems - other than the fact that my old 32-bit applications no longer work, which was expected. I prefer using a clone (prefereably on a bootable SSD) so that I can always go back to the old operating system if needed. And if you have 32-bit software that you might need again, that will permit you to still use it by booting from the external SSD.