MacBook – Copy home directory from one Mac to another both running macOS Catalina

copy/pastemacbook proNetworkrsyncwifi

I have a new 16" and an older 15" MacBook Pros both running macOS Catalina. I want to transfer all my the content in my home directory to the new MacBook Pro while retaining the same username.

How do I do this?

Different problems have occurred since I have a huge amount of data about 1.3TB of it to transfer.

  1. With scp -rp: Over my local Wi-Fi network, it is slow and mainly, files with a too long full path are not copied.

  2. With rsync -aZv: Slow here too and there are the same issue than with scp with the long full path of filenames to copy.

  3. By linking the 2 MacBook Pros with a Thunderbolt cable : With Shared directory, too slow and I have had at each time errors that stops the copy, which is very frustrating.

So, how can I copy all this data (even with a long full path for files) on to the new MacBook Pro ?

i.e how to to be able to copy all the content of my /Users/name/ directory into another directory of my new macbook pro 16", i.e into /Users/name/home_from_old_macbook_15_inch/ ?

Best Answer

Migration Assistant was designed by Apple to do just that. A direct copy may have problems because some of the things in ~/Library depend on MAC address, and some may change due to differences in hardware or O.S. version.

With 1.3 TB, speed cannot be expected.

You’ll have to have nothing else running (not even Time Machine or Spotlight indexing) to avoid error -42. According to http://www.macwizard.com/errors.html, that means “too many files open.” If no other apps are running, then report to Apple that Migration Assistant has a bug. Actually two of them—it should not open too many files, and if it does get that error, it should close some and keep going instead of quitting.

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