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Morac

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Dec 30, 2009
2,433
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Does anyone have experience with Migration Assistant when moving data to a new Mac?

I used it to move my data from my M1 MBA to my new M4 Mac Studio. Nearly everything moved over except some cache data which I figured was okay. My understanding is that it left the old Mac alone, but I started seeing some odd iCloud related behavior on my MBA since doing the migration.

First off while I expected to have to enter my iCloud password on the new Mac, I had to also do that on the my MBA after I booted up from migration. I also noticed that my MBA disappeared from Screen Time after I enabled it on the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio showed 24 hours of daily screen time usage going back several weeks, which makes no sense.

Today I got a message that my MBA no longer had access to my iCloud data because it couldn't decrypt it (I have advanced data protection enabled). My MBA made me enter my Mac password to "activate iCloud", which is odd because it's been activated for years. I noticed a few hours later that my MBA showed back up in Screen Time, so now both Macs show up. I'm thinking that somehow when the data migrates over it doesn't change the iCloud identifier so both iCloud things both the old and new Mac are the same and it takes awhile to resolve that by forcing the old Mac to re-register.

Unrelated to any of this, I had to turn off Apple Intelligence on the new Mac as it was stuck downloading. Once I turned it back on, it just enabled without having to download anything, likely because it was there already, but that was on the new machine.

Has anyone every experienced any of this using migration assistance?
 
Got an M4 Macbook Air today and tried to move my files from Mac Mini M2. Migration assistant stuck in "starting up" mode and wouldn't budge. Wifi signal stable 42 mbs. Called Apple support -- totally clueless senior tech. When cancelled migration, Macbook got stuck in Recovery Mode!

Amazingly bad software from our very fashionable Tim the CEO. Apple is going down the toilet.
 
Just an update to my original post. I haven’t had to log in to iCloud again on either Mac, but shared Screen Time for both is permanently broken.

Neither Mac shows up under Screen Time as a device on my iPhone or iPad unless I go into Screen Time on the Mac. Then it will show up for maybe an hour at most before it disappears again.
 
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