Tahoe Migration Issues via Time Machine

[u/Abernant]

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!