A lesson in how not to migrate, or how I spent last weekend...
Sorry, this post is a bit long and maybe mostly of therapeutic use for myself, but this is the story of my unmitigated migration disater:
Just this weekend I got a new retina iMac, and I was already keen to try out the wonders of Migration Assistant. In my mind, I had some idea that all it needs is a few clicks on the new iMac, a few on the old, then I would make myself a nice pot of tea, relax, and after an hour or so the new iMac would happily run along just like the old one. Only much, much better.
Boy, was I wrong.
First of course I had to check out the wonder of the 5 K display, and experience the speed that was definitely missing from my 2007 model. So I created an account to check that everything was working and typed in my iCloud password in about 20 different boxes. I saw that everything was good, and then I started the MA.
The first migration attempt didn't work because my old iMac was already on 10.10.2, which is obviously much advanced from that prehistoric 10.10 which was preinstalled on the new iMac. So I downloaded the update, plus some other updates from the App Store, rebooted and tried to run MA again.
Second attempt wasn't much better - MA complained that it couldn't merge the accounts on new and old iMac because the user name was the same. Well of course it was the same, as I am using this nick already for many years on my computers... Anyway I created a temporary account with admin rights, deleted the original account and tried again.
Third attempt - finally it seems to work. MA starts copying files, tells me it will take 11-13 hours. As it it was already late, I let it running through the night. Next morning, the countdown was already at 8 min, the progress bar nearly full, so I thought let's have a shower and then have a go at my new machine.
Freshly showered (me, not the MA), MA greeted me with the message that it would now start to copy applications, for about 1 hour 50 min. Okaaaay. The progress bar was still nearly full. Hm, I thought, at least I brought my laptop from work so that I can check my emails, so that's what I did.
From time to time, I had a look at the screen, and it was like a live performance of Back into the Future - 2 hours, 3 hours, 7 hours, 11 hours, 27 hours, and the progress bar still stayed where it was. At that time I thought Apple should probably rename the program to Continental Drift Assistant, as this was more in line with the time scale involved.
You probably know the famous paradox of the race between the turtle and the hare - it seemed Apple found a way to implement it in software. I was getting a bit nervous (knowing that in the original fable, the race never ends), so I googled a bit. There I found that MA problems like that are not uncommon, but some people had success by just waiting it out.
Anyway, I had some stuff to do so I decided to let it run on. After maybe some 2 hours I came back, and MA told me it was finished, only some files couldn't be copied over. Total running time of MA so far was maybe 18 hours.
Phew, I thought, even Apple cannot split digital units into infinitesimal fractions! So I gave the newly migrated system a try - but actually nothing worked. Trying out even simple "drag into application folder" type of applications, I only got some dialog boxes asking for my admin password, and afterwards some messages about problems with library files. Also my iTunes library was still missing, and generally the system looked pretty useless.
Well, let's wipe the disk and try again. So first stop was recovery console, but it looks that on the new Macs it somehow runs off the Macintosh HD - at least I couldn't erase the disk. So I thought I can try to do a reinstall of Yosemite.
2 hours later (most of which the installer told me that it would need 1 minute to finish), I had my system back, only now with 2 copies of my data, and still no program except for the built-ins working.
Well, let's wipe the disk and try again. This time I created the Yosemite installer on a USB stick (thanks, internet!), and finally got the fresh install that I was missing by now. Again, create account, type iCloud password in umpteen boxes, and start the MA.
This time I decided to use the backup from Time Machine which resides on my Airport Extreme.
For people who are new to Apple I should probably point out at this point that I am not some billionaire who is meddling with the space-time continuum at his private hangar somewhere in the Mojave desert. What I wrote in the last paragraph is just the usual nonsense that we Apple addicts say to identify each other. It makes us sound sooo cool.
Okay, open MA, select Airport disk, login as System Administrator - wait, did I ever set up a password for that? Let's check the Airport utility on the old iMac. Oh, there is a password! Now if could remember what is behind those black dots... Well, let's put a new one here, reboot the router and then back to the MA. Password not accepted. But wait, there is also a password for disk access on the router! So I type in name and password for this, login box dissapears and....
... nothing happens. Let's give it a few more minutes, after all I already wasted half my weekend on this...
... still nothing.
At this time, I felt nearly relieved. If MA doesn't work, let's move the files manually and reinstall all software from scratch. Thankfully I am on a fast internet connection, so after spending the whole evening yesterday downloading and copying and installing and copying and installing again, I am nearly at a point where the new iMac is actually becoming productive.
To sum it up: history has shown many times that migration is often a painful process. Apple has shown this too, at least for me.
