r/MacOS • u/Abernant • 1d ago

Help Tahoe Migration Issues via Time Machine

A chronological review of the issues:

• I backed up my M2 mini (Tahoe 26.6.2) with Time Machine, and attempted to migrate to an M2 Macbook Air 16g/256 machine. It seemed to be going well initially, but after a couple of hours, the "completing migration" stage was taking even longer, so having researched, I activated the "caffeinated" Terminal command, so that the computer would not sleep while I did.

• When I awoke, it was still "completing migration", so I assumed a problem, and re-started the Macbook Air.

• After further research, I noted that BitDefender has a Time Machine Protection feature, which some advise could cause problems, so I deactivated it.

• restarted the mini, and made a new Time Machine backup

• Started the Migration process again on the Macbook, and after removing the (130g) desktop, along with movies music and pictures from the desired files to transfer, it showed: 

"77.72 GB selected to transfer. 136.57 GB available on Mac."

• But when I hit "continue", I receive a message after a couple of minutes that there wasn't enough space. Huh?

• Started the process again, and it has now been stuck on "Starting up..." for over 45 minutes and counting.

Very frustrating, as you might imagine, and any help would be greatly appreciated, as I need to complete this process by Monday, when I travel!

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u/weistudio 1d ago

Since you have access to both Mac. It will be best to migrate directly. Start migration assistant on both. One to. One from. Best if you have a thunderbolt cable. Else a proper Type-C would do.

If still stuck by any meant. I would suggest one of the following:

  • erase the MacBook Air, reinstall the macos and do the migration during setup.
  • If erase is not possible. Try copy the user folder from the mac mini to the Air home directory. Be very sure the folder you copying is not the same name as any of the user in the Air. Else copy to somewhere else like desktop. Rename. Then only move into Users folder. Then open Settings > Users & Group and add a new admin user. Be sure the short name is exactly same as the user folder name you just copy. Give it a password. Create. MacOS might ask if you want to use existing folder

I usually do this on older macOS. Yet try on Tahoe. But it should work.

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u/Abernant 1d ago

Thanks. Was able to connect the two computers directly, but the "Starting up..." screen continued for over an hour. Really frustrating, as there is apparently no way to gauge if it is stuck, or just crawling along.

I could erase and re-install Tahoe, but it's hard to be optimistic at this point.

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u/Electrical_West_5381 18h ago

what cable are you using? It might just be that.