What's the best way to transfer one or several home folders between two Macs (OSX 10.9.5)?
Someone is probably going to suggest the Migration assistant, which I tried for the first time today, but here's the problem....
On the new Mac (a 2012 Mac mini) there are two drives: a 250GB SSD and a 500GB hard drive. There's no room for the Home folders on the SSD, so what I've done after installing OSX 10.9.5 on the new Mac from scratch is create the users (with the same names as before, on the old Mac) the normal way (meaning they'll be on the SSD).
Then, I've copied them over to the (newly initialized) internal hard drive and finally used the Users & groups system preference to relocate to the new locations (right clicking on each user to get at the Advanced options).
Now, the problem is (in my experience, unless I've missed something) that Migration assistant only transfers stuff over from the old Mac to the SSD, regardless of having changed the Home folder paths to the hard drive, which means I don't have room for everything on the SSD, so I've opted to leave out some large folders (documents, Movies, Music etc.) so at least all the "specialized" files belonging in the Library folder would at least be migrated properly.
The idea was to copy those folders over at the end, manually (drag & drop) from the old computer to the new computer's hard drive (I booted the old computer into "Target mode" which makes the old computer show up as an external hard drive on the new computer).
Alas I'm getting into all sorts of permission problems, refusing me to copy and so on. I'm at loss on if I should log in as the user I'm currently going to copy the folders for, or if I should log in as someone completely different, or if I need to do a Finder "Get info" on that folder, ensure that the owner is the same name as its home folder, having read/write rights and "Apply to enclosing items" or something completely different. There must be a simple way to transfer everything from one Mac to another, even with the home folders relocated.
UPDATE:
After all of the above mess I decided to manually (Finder drag & drop) copy the individual user folders (Documents, Movies, Pictures etc.) from the old Mac to the new Mac's home folder (currently not in use of course as that would just cause problems, but for the time being just a normal folder).
After a lot of messing around with permissions (Finder "Get info") I've succeeded in copying over all the folders (Documents, Movies, Desktop etc.); using the Finder's "Get info" for both source and destination folders I've been able to compare the content (amount of files and size) and I believe everything's copied correctly.
That is... everything except the "Library" folder!
I've tried changing all sorts of permissions, but even if things seem OK (the copying process is started and runs for a while), all of a sudden I'm told that some files can't be copied because I don't have permission. So back to square one: change the permissions to something new and give it another go (obviously I want to transfer 100% of what's inside the user's "Library" folder).
I know I probably shouldn't do this with the original folder (the old Mac which I'm copying from), but I'm not aware of any other solution.
Currently I've changed the "Library" folder's permissions so that all the users (the one I've logged in with while doing this, the actual owner of the folder and everyone else can read/write, changed the owner to the user I've logged in with, and selected "apply to enclosed items" which I expected to do just that -affect every folder/file/sub-folder with the same permissions.
I will be changing the permissions back afterwards of course, but what am I doing wrong since I can't be able to copy the Library folder over without running into problems?
Someone is probably going to suggest the Migration assistant, which I tried for the first time today, but here's the problem....
On the new Mac (a 2012 Mac mini) there are two drives: a 250GB SSD and a 500GB hard drive. There's no room for the Home folders on the SSD, so what I've done after installing OSX 10.9.5 on the new Mac from scratch is create the users (with the same names as before, on the old Mac) the normal way (meaning they'll be on the SSD).
Then, I've copied them over to the (newly initialized) internal hard drive and finally used the Users & groups system preference to relocate to the new locations (right clicking on each user to get at the Advanced options).
Now, the problem is (in my experience, unless I've missed something) that Migration assistant only transfers stuff over from the old Mac to the SSD, regardless of having changed the Home folder paths to the hard drive, which means I don't have room for everything on the SSD, so I've opted to leave out some large folders (documents, Movies, Music etc.) so at least all the "specialized" files belonging in the Library folder would at least be migrated properly.
The idea was to copy those folders over at the end, manually (drag & drop) from the old computer to the new computer's hard drive (I booted the old computer into "Target mode" which makes the old computer show up as an external hard drive on the new computer).
Alas I'm getting into all sorts of permission problems, refusing me to copy and so on. I'm at loss on if I should log in as the user I'm currently going to copy the folders for, or if I should log in as someone completely different, or if I need to do a Finder "Get info" on that folder, ensure that the owner is the same name as its home folder, having read/write rights and "Apply to enclosing items" or something completely different. There must be a simple way to transfer everything from one Mac to another, even with the home folders relocated.
UPDATE:
After all of the above mess I decided to manually (Finder drag & drop) copy the individual user folders (Documents, Movies, Pictures etc.) from the old Mac to the new Mac's home folder (currently not in use of course as that would just cause problems, but for the time being just a normal folder).
After a lot of messing around with permissions (Finder "Get info") I've succeeded in copying over all the folders (Documents, Movies, Desktop etc.); using the Finder's "Get info" for both source and destination folders I've been able to compare the content (amount of files and size) and I believe everything's copied correctly.
That is... everything except the "Library" folder!
I've tried changing all sorts of permissions, but even if things seem OK (the copying process is started and runs for a while), all of a sudden I'm told that some files can't be copied because I don't have permission. So back to square one: change the permissions to something new and give it another go (obviously I want to transfer 100% of what's inside the user's "Library" folder).
I know I probably shouldn't do this with the original folder (the old Mac which I'm copying from), but I'm not aware of any other solution.
Currently I've changed the "Library" folder's permissions so that all the users (the one I've logged in with while doing this, the actual owner of the folder and everyone else can read/write, changed the owner to the user I've logged in with, and selected "apply to enclosed items" which I expected to do just that -affect every folder/file/sub-folder with the same permissions.
I will be changing the permissions back afterwards of course, but what am I doing wrong since I can't be able to copy the Library folder over without running into problems?
Last edited:
