Migrating Files from Windows to Mac - best practice?

[iBought]

I see a lot of posts on migrating from 1 mac to another but I would like to figure out the best way to pull my files from my Windows PC and get them on my mac.


Ideally I would love to plug in an external SSD to my windows computer and pull everything off that way. But I am guessing that’s not possible due to the different HD formats, or is it?

Any software I will just reinstall on the Mac, but this is a lot of audio and project files that I need to transfer over. Is uploading to the cloud and pulling back down the only way? And if so do I need to zip everything up first so it unpacks on the mac in proper format?

Just something I have not fully wrapped my head around in the migration.

 

[mk313]

Apple has a program called windows migration assistant that should be helpful in getting everything moved over.

I’ve never had a pc so I can’t say any specifics.

 

[||\||]

I see a lot of posts on migrating from 1 mac to another but I would like to figure out the best way to pull my files from my Windows PC and get them on my mac.


Ideally I would love to plug in an external SSD to my windows computer and pull everything off that way.

If you format as ExFat, the drive will be readable by both machines.

You can also mount the old NTFS (Windows) drive externally to your Mac and copy files off that way. Macs can read NTFS, but can't write to them without additional translation software.

 

[iBought]

If you format as ExFat, the drive will be readable by both machines.

You can also mount the old NTFS (Windows) drive externally to your Mac and copy files off that way. Macs can read NTFS, but can't write to them without additional translation software.

Ok thanks, this is really interesting. So if I bought some SSDs and formatted them as ExFat, then I could plug them into the Windows PC and fill them up with my files.

And then I could plug them into the new mac and the drives would function just fine with no issues? I should add that I will be writing onto these drives a lot with the new mac once everything is set up.

 

[||\||]

Ok thanks, this is really interesting. So if I bought some SSDs and formatted them as ExFat, then I could plug them into the Windows PC and fill them up with my files.

And then I could plug them into the new mac and the drives would function just fine with no issues? I should add that I will be writing onto these drives a lot with the new mac once everything is set up.

Yes. ExFat can be read from and written to by both operating systems. ExFat does not use any sort of journaling (helpful for recovery and error correction), so I would not suggest keeping that format long term if you will be writing to it frequently. The only good reason to keep ExFat long term nowadays is is you will be using the drive cross-platform.

One more option is to copy over network. APFS can read and write to NTFS over a network connection. NTFS can read and write to APFS over network as well.

 

[The_Interloper]

I've been using Windows NTFS-formatted drives with Macs for many years with no issue. For full read/write access, use Mounty or the Paragon Seagate driver (works with everything NTFS, not just Seagate drives). Both are free.

 

[||\||]

I've been using Windows NTFS-formatted drives with Macs for many years with no issue. For full read/write access, use Mounty or the Paragon Seagate driver (works with everything NTFS, not just Seagate drives). Both are free.

I almost lost and entire TB of data migrating a drive over to a Mac using Paragon. It corrupted the journaling somehow and I lost all the file names. The actual file data was still intact, but still...it was a HUGE pain that cost months and untold hours combing through a list of random files to sort what was important. Paragon is probably fine for small saves and every day use. I would advise against using this sort of translation software during a mass migration.

 

[Cayenne1]

Ran both MacOS and WinPC for years. Win for work, Mac for me and sanity.

As mentioned, Macs can read NTFS, but not write natively. Paragon has an Mac NTFS driver ($) that can allow read write. However, I have also experienced issues with that driver so I just bought an extra USB drive, formatted as MacOS journaled, and copied all NTFS files and directory structure to that drive. Now you have all files in MacOS with a backup.

Now there may be issues with PC only software requirements and good ole Microsoft not porting like for like such as Office. For the former, I use a program called Parallels to build a virtual PC on my Mac. I have both a WinXP and Win10 VM that run all my PC programs seamlessly on my Mac (Visio, MSProject, Adobe CS6, etc.). Parallels is $ and you need Windows license. For the later, its just a PITA for items like Outlook.

By the way, you list a MacBook Pro 2015. Probably a good buy, but a little old.

 

[iBought]

The drive formatting may be an issue for me. Im considering cloud backup and just pullling the files down that way. We are talking mainly .wav,.doc.video files and project files from programs like Ableton Live that i want to pull from Win10 and put on the mac.

 

[/V\acpower]

In Windows 10 it's pretty easy to create a network share drive. Right click on the Drive, Share, there you have options (which user can access it, etc.)

Then in macOS Finder, CMD+K open network drive dialog. Type SMB://[YourPCName or your PC local IP address], then it should be able to see your drive (it will ask to identify, you can do so using your PC username and password).

There is more to it than that, there are many tutorials online to create a SMB shared drive in Windows. All you need is for both computer to be connected on the same local network (router).

It will be slower than using an external drive. But way way faster than your "cloud storage" solution.

 

[iBought]

In Windows 10 it's pretty easy to create a network share drive. Right click on the Drive, Share, there you have options (which user can access it, etc.)

Then in macOS Finder, CMD+K open network drive dialog. Type SMB://[YourPCName or your PC local IP address], then it should be able to see your drive (it will ask to identify, you can do so using your PC username and password).

There is more to it than that, there are many tutorials online to create a SMB shared drive in Windows. All you need is for both computer to be connected on the same local network (router).

It will be slower than using an external drive. But way way faster than your "cloud storage" solution.

Ok nice i may do this. Already found and tweaked the “advanced sharing” in windows. Now i see my drive F is on the network under my desktop name.

awesome. And i guess no file format errors or anything when moved to mac? This looks like a solid solution for me.

i ask because i read a few posts where people said to zip the whole drive before transferring it.

 

[/V\acpower]

I don't see the point. Just copy-paste de files you need to your Mac.

But of course, I guess there would be a way to Zip them all, do a "checksum" on that Zip file, then move them to the Mac, checksum them again to make sure there was no error.

But this is beyond my expertise how to do that.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"Ideally I would love to plug in an external SSD to my windows computer and pull everything off that way. But I am guessing that’s not possible due to the different HD formats, or is it?"

NO, you're approach of using an external HD is a good one.
ExFAT would be the format to use on the drive.
DON'T use NTSC (or whatever that one is).

Also...
My suggestion is that you keep the PC set up and running for at least a few weeks after you get stuff moved over to the Mac. This will give you the ability to "go back to the PC" if you find yourself getting hung up on the Mac side.

Also...
I'd suggest you not move everything "all at once".
Concentrate on one area, get it going to your satisfaction, then move to another, etc.

mk313 has a good suggest about windows migration assistant. That could be a BIG help.

 

[solouki]

The drive formatting may be an issue for me. Im considering cloud backup and just pullling the files down that way. We are talking mainly .wav,.doc.video files and project files from programs like Ableton Live that i want to pull from Win10 and put on the mac.

Hi iBought,

If you are transferring a large amount of disk space, which you probably are with video and audio files, then you might find the cloud backup is somewhat slow.

If you don't want to purchase new external SSDs for the transfer, then you might try "rsync", which runs on both Windows and macOS. The advantage of rsync is that it will transfer all of your files over your WiFi connection and do so with checksumming so that you are assured that the copies are identical. It also maintains all file attributes, such as ownership and permissions, as well as your directory/folder structure. Plus once you have copied the bulk of the files, then any future changes on either the Windows of the Mac side can be synchronized easily with rsync -- and this syncing occurs differentially. The downside is rsync is a little slower than a regular WiFi transfer because of the checksumming, but you can execute a single rsync terminal command and transfer all of your files and directory structures overnight without your intervention. (As an example, the Carbon Copy Cloner backup program for the Mac uses rsync to clone your Mac's drive.). Rsync also works on Linux machines (and even the Raspberry Pi) and thus can be used to transfer file between Windows, macOS, Linux, and a Raspberry Pi media server. (I use rsync to transfer files to and from VMs running Win10 and Linux.)

Rsync is not as fast as an external exFAT SSD, but it is probably faster than a cloud backup transfer (unless you already have all of these files in the cloud). You also won't have the disk formatting issues with rsync that you will have with an external SSD.

...just another option you might consider.

Regards,
Solouki

 

[iBought]

Ran both MacOS and WinPC for years. Win for work, Mac for me and sanity.

As mentioned, Macs can read NTFS, but not write natively. Paragon has an Mac NTFS driver ($) that can allow read write. However, I have also experienced issues with that driver so I just bought an extra USB drive, formatted as MacOS journaled, and copied all NTFS files and directory structure to that drive. Now you have all files in MacOS with a backup.

Now there may be issues with PC only software requirements and good ole Microsoft not porting like for like such as Office. For the former, I use a program called Parallels to build a virtual PC on my Mac. I have both a WinXP and Win10 VM that run all my PC programs seamlessly on my Mac (Visio, MSProject, Adobe CS6, etc.). Parallels is $ and you need Windows license. For the later, its just a PITA for items like Outlook.

By the way, you list a MacBook Pro 2015. Probably a good buy, but a little old.

Man I didn’t know what you were talking about until I finally noticed my sig. Wow, yeah I need to update that. Sorry all, that was made a while back and I hadn’t even thought to change it.

I’m actually planning to get a new M1 or M1X Imac.

 

[iBought]

Hi iBought,

If you are transferring a large amount of disk space, which you probably are with video and audio files, then you might find the cloud backup is somewhat slow.

If you don't want to purchase new external SSDs for the transfer, then you might try "rsync", which runs on both Windows and macOS. The advantage of rsync is that it will transfer all of your files over your WiFi connection and do so with checksumming so that you are assured that the copies are identical. It also maintains all file attributes, such as ownership and permissions, as well as your directory/folder structure. Plus once you have copied the bulk of the files, then any future changes on either the Windows of the Mac side can be synchronized easily with rsync -- and this syncing occurs differentially. The downside is rsync is a little slower than a regular WiFi transfer because of the checksumming, but you can execute a single rsync terminal command and transfer all of your files and directory structures overnight without your intervention. (As an example, the Carbon Copy Cloner backup program for the Mac uses rsync to clone your Mac's drive.). Rsync also works on Linux machines (and even the Raspberry Pi) and thus can be used to transfer file between Windows, macOS, Linux, and a Raspberry Pi media server. (I use rsync to transfer files to and from VMs running Win10 and Linux.)

Rsync is not as fast as an external exFAT SSD, but it is probably faster than a cloud backup transfer (unless you already have all of these files in the cloud). You also won't have the disk formatting issues with rsync that you will have with an external SSD.

...just another option you might consider.

Regards,
Solouki

Thank you. What are your thoughts on Macpowers solution of sharingf the drives on my WIFI network and transferring that way?

I don’t need permsissions or anything like that copied over. Basically, I am just transferring over a lot of WAV files, some documents and some session files from a program called Ableton Live (which I will install fresh on the Mac).

Some people want to bring over their email clients and calendars and such. For me I don’t need any of those types of things. Fresh start for me besides the audio files and Sessions.

 

[solouki]

Thank you. What are your thoughts on Macpowers solution of sharingf the drives on my WIFI network and transferring that way?

I don’t need permsissions or anything like that copied over. Basically, I am just transferring over a lot of WAV files, some documents and some session files from a program called Ableton Live (which I will install fresh on the Mac).

Some people want to bring over their email clients and calendars and such. For me I don’t need any of those types of things. Fresh start for me besides the audio files and Sessions.

iBought,

Whatever works for you is, of course, the best solution.

I was just suggesting another easy, secure, robust, and relatively fast way to transfer files. The advantages of using "rsync" are four-fold: (1) you don't need to smb mount a drive from another machine, (2) rsync handles the checksumming on both ends for you, (3) rsync does differential copies so it is very efficient at keeping two directory structures and all their files synchronized, and (4) you can rsync your files in either direction (to or from) from either machine (the Windows PS or the Mac).

The appropriate "rsync" command will look something like the following, with your appropriate names inserted:

rsync --rsh='ssh -p22' -avz <Win-machine>:/<folder-name> <Mac-machine>:/Users/<your-user-name>

This command will copy, after compression (compressed to minimize the bandwidth required), all files in the directory structure under the <folder-name> directory on the Windows machine to the Mac machine placing the <folder-name> directory structure into your user login directory. Of course, you have to turn on file sharing on both machines to allow these actions. If the transfer is interrupted for any reason, that's no problem as you just reissue the command and it picks up where it left off.

Regards,
Solouki

 

[iBought]

iBought,

Whatever works for you is, of course, the best solution.

I was just suggesting another easy, secure, robust, and relatively fast way to transfer files. The advantages of using "rsync" are four-fold: (1) you don't need to smb mount a drive from another machine, (2) rsync handles the checksumming on both ends for you, (3) rsync does differential copies so it is very efficient at keeping two directory structures and all their files synchronized, and (4) you can rsync your files in either direction (to or from) from either machine (the Windows PS or the Mac).

The appropriate "rsync" command will look something like the following, with your appropriate names inserted:

rsync --rsh='ssh -p22' -avz <Win-machine>:/<folder-name> <Mac-machine>:/Users/<your-user-name>

This command will copy, after compression (compressed to minimize the bandwidth required), all files in the directory structure under the <folder-name> directory on the Windows machine to the Mac machine placing the <folder-name> directory structure into your user login directory. Of course, you have to turn on file sharing on both machines to allow these actions. If the transfer is interrupted for any reason, that's no problem as you just reissue the command and it picks up where it left off.

Regards,
Solouki

Very interesting thank you. This is a nice option. One thing I probably didn’t explain well is I need 2 extra SSDs on my mac for recording to one and storing sessions on it and the other for pulling samples. So the hierarchy is the main drive runs the program, the D drive is where I write new audio and the E drive is where I pull audio samples from. So no matter what I will need to buy 2 SSDs, and I basically want to copy SSD drive D contents from windows to new Mac’s SSD drive D.

Probably doesn’t change anything, but I bring this up since instead of <folder name> I would probably type <D:> and then I’d need to change the destination on the Mac to the external SSD I have attached to it, and not the main drive.

 

[solouki]

iBought,

...just to be clear, for any potential future usage, the <...>, 'less than' and 'greater than', symbols are not included in what you type, these just signal that the stuff in-between should be replaced appropriately.

Solouki

p.s. In the rsync command I gave earlier, the "--rsh='ssh -p22' " option tells rsync to use an ssh (secure shell) tunnel on port 22 to transfer the files. The "-avz" options tell rsync to "archive", meaning transfer permissions, ownerships, etc., to do it "verbose" so it logs the files transferred, and to "compress" the files being transferred. There are many other options that may also be specified. On the Mac, the Terminal command, "man rsync", will print out the documentation for all of the rsync options.

 

[wys]

Is the OP's question resolved? Or are we just posting "general guidelines"?

To start with, I am a little confused about what we're talking about here, because "migrate files from windows to mac" implies a one-way transfer of files, and that once they are copied off Windows they will be used only in the Mac.

Alternatively, it seems like OP might (?) actually want to be able to work with the files both from Windows and from Mac.

Either way, there are two main methods of transferring files: using physically attached volumes & "sneakernet", or over a network.

You can put the files on an external physical storage device (SSH, HDD, flash drive, etc.), copy from Windows into the device, then plug the device into your Mac and access them there. For this, you will want the external drive formatted as NTFS if you only need read-access to the files from the Mac side, or exFAT if you want to be able to read & write the files in-place on the storage device from the Mac.

If you want to use the network instead, you can create an SMB share either in Windows or in macOS on the computer you already have to copy to/from one computer to the other. Or you might be able to use ssh if you can get that configured on both devices.

As described, I prefer to use `rsync` for all file copying, both between physical volumes and over the network, with the `rsync -vrahPl` args or the extra `-z` arg with ssh configs. These days you can actually use `rsync` directly from within Windows thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Not sure if `rsync` is available in Windows cmd.exe or PowerShell by default. Its not terribly hard to enable WSL2 on Windows so I might suggest trying that first and then seeing if you can't get ssh configured on both devices.

------

if you really just want to ditch Windows and gain access to the files from Mac, I think my first course of action would be to simply rip the hard drive out of the Windows machine, put it inside any basic USB external drive enclosure (or hard drive dock if the drive is headed to the closet after copying), plug it into Mac where it will be read-only thanks to NTFS, and from there just copy files to the desired destination. Simple, easy, all it costs is $10-25 for an appropriate USB enclosure or dock.

If you actually want to be able to continue working with the files from both Mac and Windows, I would start thinking about either setting up a dedicated PC/Mac to run as a file server over SMB, or just get a dedicated NAS device, or something in between. Accessing files over the network is the real solution to OS filesystem compatibility questions

 

[iBought]

Is the OP's question resolved? Or are we just posting "general guidelines"?

To start with, I am a little confused about what we're talking about here, because "migrate files from windows to mac" implies a one-way transfer of files, and that once they are copied off Windows they will be used only in the Mac.

Alternatively, it seems like OP might (?) actually want to be able to work with the files both from Windows and from Mac.

Either way, there are two main methods of transferring files: using physically attached volumes & "sneakernet", or over a network.

You can put the files on an external physical storage device (SSH, HDD, flash drive, etc.), copy from Windows into the device, then plug the device into your Mac and access them there. For this, you will want the external drive formatted as NTFS if you only need read-access to the files from the Mac side, or exFAT if you want to be able to read & write the files in-place on the storage device from the Mac.

If you want to use the network instead, you can create an SMB share either in Windows or in macOS on the computer you already have to copy to/from one computer to the other. Or you might be able to use ssh if you can get that configured on both devices.

As described, I prefer to use `rsync` for all file copying, both between physical volumes and over the network, with the `rsync -vrahPl` args or the extra `-z` arg with ssh configs. These days you can actually use `rsync` directly from within Windows thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Not sure if `rsync` is available in Windows cmd.exe or PowerShell by default. Its not terribly hard to enable WSL2 on Windows so I might suggest trying that first and then seeing if you can't get ssh configured on both devices.

------

if you really just want to ditch Windows and gain access to the files from Mac, I think my first course of action would be to simply rip the hard drive out of the Windows machine, put it inside any basic USB external drive enclosure (or hard drive dock if the drive is headed to the closet after copying), plug it into Mac where it will be read-only thanks to NTFS, and from there just copy files to the desired destination. Simple, easy, all it costs is $10-25 for an appropriate USB enclosure or dock.

If you actually want to be able to continue working with the files from both Mac and Windows, I would start thinking about either setting up a dedicated PC/Mac to run as a file server over SMB, or just get a dedicated NAS device, or something in between. Accessing files over the network is the real solution to OS filesystem compatibility questions

Oh man that last solution is a “duh“moment for me. Why did I not think of this?

So yes, I would be moving off of the Windows PC onto Mac full time. I will be using 2 new SSDs on the Mac for reading and writing data so I’d like to transfer the existing data I already have onto the new drives from the old Windows SSds. That’s really it.

I didn’t know the formatting would allow this transfer. Is there any particular USB case you suggest? To me this seems like the fastest way and the smartest way to do this.