Advice On Migrating

[thewall]

Maybe a silly question but i'm thinking of buying a iMac with M1 chip with 512gb, i have a 2014 iMac with 1tb which is 80% full, how do i migrate to a smaller storage machine.

 

[Bigwaff]

Delete stuff or transfer to external drive. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Dave Braine]

As Bigwaff said.

 

[HDFan]

Be sure to keep 20-30% of the boot disk free.

Do an analysis of your current disk via something like DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective. If you are lucky some libraries such as Music or Pictures can be moved to an external disk before you do the migration to the new machine. Once you have the old machine running with no more than ~358 GB used then do the migration. Make sure you have 3-2-1 backups before you do all of this.

You might want to consider getting a larger boot disk to avoid all of this. System disk requirements will only increase over time.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

The easy answer here is:
Don't buy an iMac with a 512gb drive.

Get one with a 1tb internal drive.
Doing so will make things easier.

REASON WHY:
With a 512gb drive, you're going to have to "cut down" the amount of data that gets transferred to considerably BELOW 512gb.
That's because a Mac needs sufficient "headroom" in which to operate -- I reckon at least 20gb or so.

Unless you have A LOT of stuff on the old iMac that you can "off-load" to external drives, or just delete...