I’m in the process of migrating to a new Mac. It is proving surprisingly cumbersome to do so. The Migration Assistant I tried in peer to peer mode stalls as soon as one of the laptops (and then both) falls asleep, and does not resume when woken up. Giving it expects to take several hours to copy everything it isn’t viable to stay next to it just to keep both machines awake. I set both up to not fall asleep, but those are system settings within a user account it appears, and it logs out of those when doing the migration. I could migrate from my Time Machine to the new laptop, which also needs the Migration Assitant however, which loops me back to the falling asleep bit.
So I’ve decided to do the migration by hand. That’s actuallly not entirely unwelcome as it allows me to ignore the accumulated detritus of working on the old laptop for 7 years. It’s just a lot of work to think of how to copy over certain databases, licenses, settings of specific tools etc. It will have to happen in stages, and partly as needs arise.
All the software I intend to keep using is installed (Evernote nor Things are making the move with me). I’ve copied over my documents archive, and connected the new laptop to my Nextcloud cloud. Next steps are setting up my e-mail and calendar accounts in Thunderbird, and migrating my Alfred snippets. After those I’m good to go for working on the new laptop. Anything else is non-essential, and can be dealt with in stages. This includes image and music libraries, book collections, etc. It likely will be a good while until I’ve added the various tweaks and twiddles to reduce friction in my workflows, to mirror 7 years worth of tweaks on the old system.
My migration was a little smoother, but only a little. For starters, the new iMac came with High Sierra installed, despite being bought several months after Mojave was released, so I had to upgrade macOS before I could restore anything from my Time Machine backups. Also, I knew that the Fusion Drive would be a performance bottleneck in the long-term, so once I’d gotten all my important applications reinstalled I could clone the system disk to an external SSD, boot from that and repurpose the Fusion Drive for archival storage.
The new set-up is working, after moving manually.
As the M1 Macs don’t support more than one screen, have just 2 USB-C ports, and my regular set-up consists of two additional screens, I had to make some adaptations. I added a StarTech USB-C Dual HDMI Monitor Docking station (not visible in the image, as it is at the foot of the left lamp, hidden from sight by the laptop), that also has 3 USB-A, one USB-C, a Gb Ethernet and audio port. That connects to one of the USB-C ports on the Mac. Currently I’ve attached the two screens, my USB keyboard and the 4TB external HDD I’m using to move from my old laptop to the new one.
The docking station is DisplayLink compatible, and combined with installing the DisplayLink manager on my laptop makes the two external screens work. At first one screen went dark for a second every few seconds. DisplayLink suggested this may have something to do with cable quality. Sure enough when I switched the two screens’ cables the other one had the problem. So I tried another cable I had lying around, and then it worked.
My Wacom Intuos pen tablet needed a new driver installed, found in the download section of Wacom’s site. There should be a next version, better suited to the new Macs, available early February, but this one works too. The Wacom is connected to the other USB-C port on the Mac through an adapter that splits that USB-C port into a USB-A, HDMI and USB-C port, the latter one used for the power supply.
I also migrated my 113 Alfred snippets, so my keyboards shortcuts all work again in the way my fingers’ muscle memory knows them.
I’m now ready to fully work from the new laptop, as the most important things are done. Next comes a number of weeks of re-adding tweaks, migrating archive-stuff (old e-mail, images, books, music etc.), and things like my locally run webserver and its related databases and html files.