backupmacbook promigrationtime-machine
Is there a way for me to migrate from Catalina to Mojave, using either the Migration Assistant or a TimeMachine backup? If I a restore from a TimeMachine backup, won’t it also restore the Catalina version of macOS on the new MacBook Air?
Have you tried right clicking on the time machine icon on your dock, and telling it to browse other time machine disks? See if Time Machine will recognize it as a backup, and see if it will restore any files that way.
When you select Restore From Time Machine backup it doesn't even see the external drive or list it/any backups?
I have WiFi off. I can access the time capsule using air port utility. Neither device is connected to the internet.
You say you have WiFi off. Does that mean you are hard wired to the Time Capsule via LAN? You may need to verify that your Mac can indeed see the Time Capsule. That part of your question is a bit confusing.
You may wish to try again from scratch using macOS Recovery. See Apple support for more details. This will help you to reinstall macOS and restore from a Time Machine backup.
Hold down Command-R or one of the other macOS Recovery key combinations on your keyboard immediately after pressing the power button to turn on your Mac, or immediately after your Mac begins to restart. Continue holding until you see the Apple logo or a spinning globe. Startup is complete when you see the utilities window:
After starting up from macOS Recovery, select from these utilities, then click Continue.
From there follow the onscreen instructions to restore from backup or even reinstall macOS then restore from Time Machine.
Best Answer
To migrate to another MacOS version you only need to copy over your home folder and
/Applications(excluding the pre-installed MacOS apps).You can use any backup tool such as Time Machine or
rsync(here is an example).For Time Machine, go to Settings > Time Machine > Options and add the folders to exclude from the backup.
You can click the + button or drag the folders from Finder into the excluded list. To avoid backing up the operating system drag
/System,/Library,/optand/usr.If you use homebrew it's probably better to configure it from scratch on a new machine. It might be useful to generate a list of current brew packages with
brew listandbrew cask list. Then you can reinstall all your brew packages withbrew install < mypackages.txtandbrew cask install < mycaskpackages.txtaccordingly.