Transferring from 10-yo Mac to new one : a few technical Questions

By Mara, 6 June, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Helo all-
I am assisting a friend to set up his new Mac. he is coming from a 10-6ear-old MacBook Air to a new, shiny apple silicon MacBook Air. (wow) it still works!?)
before we start I have a few technical questions:
*1 can we transfer all his stuff Mac to Mac with a USBc cable? or is there a better way?
*2 he has some custom keystrokes in keyboard commander (I don't use it ). I was wondering if these would be transferred as part of the data migration or should we do it some other way?
Thanks for any help!
Best to all-
Mara.

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Comments

By MarkSarch on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

Hello Mara!
try Migration Assistant Application
it should be on
application folder
utilities
read all the requirements that you need in order to transfer all the data.
Regarding to the 2nd question all the keystrokes will be transfer as well

By mr grieves on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

Is migration assistant all or nothing? Or can you select what you want to copy? The Apple page says "users and folders" or something. How does it work with applications given migrating from Intel to Apple Silicon?

By Tyler on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Most apps written for the X86 architecture will work on Apple Silicon via Rosetta 2, but for best results you should install the ARM native versions of such apps if available.

By Mara on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

So, as was asked above, is it all or nothing? am I better to set up the thing from scratch and he not have access to the old stuff?

By Siobhan on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

If you are just talking things like purchased music and docutments, just copy them over from an external drive. As for apps, chances are either they wouldn't run on the new Mac or they have alternatives that might be better. Give us some of the apps you have and i anyway and sure others can help figure out if it's worth all that invested time.

By Mara on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

I haven't seen this thing yet. email is of prime importance. I suspect - as my mate has like 2000 emails in his inbox - they may well be still on the ISP server. from the outside looking in it appears he doesn't have much stuff on it but really needs to do a clean out. I'll let you folks know what happens when I'm on the ground this weekend.

By Mara on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

I am rather worried that he'll lose his keyboard commander set up if we don't use Time Machine. perhaps you all could inform me of a way to get that stuff off. Thanks so much.

By Kevin Shaw on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

I am wondering if it's possible to copy VoiceOver portable preferences to a USB key and then use that as a backup in a case like this.

FWIW, I've done this process twice and have copied VO scripts and commanders with no issues with Migration Assistant. One thing to watch out for are changes to filenames. For example, if the machine is 10 years old, it could be using iCal instead of Calendar. Your Keyboard Commander keystroke won't open Calendar and the script will need to be remapped.

By Siobhan on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

You got me on this one. And if I look dumb when you tell me, i'll happily come and fight you. lol jk. Seriously don't know what that one is.

By PaulMartz on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

I've got a sighted friend doing a similar upgrade. His old iMac had a 1TB drive, and he's migrating to a Mac Mini with a 512GB SSD. This creates a problem you don't have. Migration Assistant won't migrate his Time Machine backup because his new system doesn't have enough storage to hold everything he had on his old Mac.

I've encouraged him to simply start using his new Mac and copy things over from the old Mac as-needed, with a thumb drive. It's a real PITA, having to reinstall apps, set up email accounts, etc. But he and I both agree much of his accumulated data on the Time Machine backup is not needed.

As an exercise, I went through my existing Mac and deleted as much old stuff as possible. With my Music Library on an external drive, I've reduced my internal SSD usage to 112GB.

Anyhow, keep us posted on your progress, and good luck.

By MarkSarch on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

Hello Mara!
If the most important is emails and voiceOver preferences will only take you few minutes to transfer those.
Set up as new computer and start from scratch
I don't know how many email accounts you have but
from System settings
internet accounts
add your accounts
The process only will take couple minutes lol
Also
from voiceOver utilities export and import your voiceOver preferences
For example from your old machine
export voiceOver preferences via
Airdrop
email
messages
or external storage
hope this help

By mr grieves on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 - 05:57

Yes, impor/export includes everything as far as I know. I had to reset my VO settings as part of a support call, and re-importing my old ones put everything back.

I presume you can transfer these settings to another Mac? I don't know why Apple support never ask for this file as it feels like such an obvious thing to give them when dealing with VO issues.