How to migrate data to a new drive in macOS

Written By: Taylor Dixon

Comments: 6

How to migrate data to a new drive in macOS

Difficulty

Very easy

Steps

Time Required

30 minutes - 3 hours

Introduction

After you’ve replaced or upgraded the SSD or hard drive in your Mac, and you’ve successfully installed macOS to the new drive, you’ll need to transfer any data you want from the old drive to the new one. This guide will show you how to use Migration Assistant to restore data from an old macOS drive or a Time Machine Backup to your new drive.

Parts

Step 1

Before you begin, connect your old macOS drive or a Time Machine backup drive to your computer.
If you forgot to make a backup of your old SSD before upgrading, you can install it to an external SSD enclosure to transfer any data you need as shown in this guide, and then keep it as an external storage drive.

Step 2

Power on your Mac and open the Migration Assistant application.
After the Migration Assistant window opens, do not press Continue until you are ready to begin the migration process. Pushing continue will automatically force close any open applications and log you out.

More recent macOS screens won’t necessarily look like the example above. You may need to Find the migration assistant app. Run the Migration Assistant that’s on the drive to which you want the migrated data to go (in other words, the new drive). Ordinarily, you will have started up from the new drive. If you haven’t, you’ll need to select it as the Startup Disk.

dwesl -

Step 3

After you are logged out and taken to the Migration Assistant screen, select the first option: transfer From a Mac, Time Machine backup, or startup disk.
Click Continue.

Step 4

Migration Assistant will list any connected macOS or Time Machine drives across the top of the window.
Select the drive you want to restore from, and click Continue.

Step 5

If the drive you have selected is a Time Machine drive, Migration Assistant will list all the backups available from which you can transfer information.
Select the backup you'd like to transfer information from, and click Continue.

Step 6

Select all the items you'd like to transfer to your new drive.
Next, Migration Assistant may prompt you to enter a new password for the account on the new drive and/or the old password for the account on the old drive.

At this point it is important to note that you have to wait until all data has been read. Otherwise, over 50% of the transmission may fail and the program will stop. without any feedback. !!!!! very important !!!!! wait until all data has been read, even if you can go on. only click on next if the actual data size is behind the selected points.

Patrick - 25/09/19

Step 7

Once you begin the transfer, a loading bar will appear and cycle through each of the data categories that you selected on the previous screen (applications, documents, etc.).
Your computer may need to restart multiple times during the transfer process.
When the transfer is complete, the Migration Complete window will appear.

So the migration got stuck 1/3rd of the way. Patrick's comment solved the issue. Thank you both! It's such a good feeling to be able to do this with your help! thanks very much!

almut -

Conclusion

Once all of your data is migrated, you can format your old drive and use it as an external drive with an SSD enclosure, or sell it for someone else to use!

Author

Taylor Dixon

Member since: 26/06/18

66785 Reputation

3 comments

You said you would be covering migrating to a “new drive” but you only showed migrating to a new computer. I have a new macbook pro, which has an internal SSD that is too small to migrate to, so I was planning on using a bigger external SSD as my main & bootup disk, and I want to migrate to that disk. If I bootup the new computer from the external disk, will the migration automatically go to the external disk? Or can you see another approach that would work?

thx

Bob Yeats - 03/12/19

You know Bob, that is a good point! I guess I meant “new drive in a new computer.” RE: your situation, I think your proposed method should work. MacOS should either let you choose which drive you want to restore to (in which case you can choose the big external one), or it will just copy to the default / boot disk. If neither of those things happen and you can’t migrate everything directly to the external drive, you can try to do a partial restore to your small internal SSD by only selecting the crucial info from the restore menu, and then manually copy everything else over to the external SSD as a storage disk. I hope this helps, sorry for the misleading title!

Taylor Dixon - 03/12/19

thank you so much

Luna Terra -