Sorry for the rookie question. Most experts here recommend Migration assistant to transfer data and applications over manually transferring after osx install. If there are errors in the older drive, won't they get transferred during transfer? What is advantage of fresh install? Why not install osx over existing macintosh drive?
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Question about osx fresh install
- Thread starter krishnaM
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I just tested migration assistant today when i upgraded my ssd, the old drive had plenty of piled up caching errors that were frozen and broken simply because the drive didnt nave enough space to sort itself out. I was expecting migration assistant to notice and ignore all of its junk and it did! The original SSD was 240GB and only had 5gbs or so left on it before I switched to my new NVME ssd that id be booting from and is 500GB, so I went into recovery mode, fresh installed Mac OS Mojave onto it, then I used migration assistant to take all my users and apps from the old drive and put them on the new one and when I checked how much it totaled the supposedly full 235/240gb in migration assistant to, it actually only totalled up to 170gb and I was positive thats the much more reasonable ssd size and that it cleared those corrupt Photos albums too. Thats not to say that all of the errors are gone but a large amount are. A fresh install of mac OS clears anything corrupt or is an error thats stuck in system files (which is alot more than you think). My situation involved 2 drives both formatted to APFS so I couldnt say the same if you’re booting/transferring on Mac OS (journaled) because it operates very differently, but my guess is that they both will have the same result.
Migration Assistant CAN recovery the error as well.
If you make a clean install due to system stability issue. You better setup as new computer. Simply sign in the Apple ID, and then manually move the data back into position (MUST copy the data INSIDE the newly created user profile to avoid permission issue).
I just did one few weeks ago. I have 3 profiles (with different Apple ID) and about 1TB data / apps need to move. Only cost me few hours to finish the whole process, not as easy as Migratiion Assiatant, but can still easily be done in Finder anyway.
If you make a clean install due to system stability issue. You better setup as new computer. Simply sign in the Apple ID, and then manually move the data back into position (MUST copy the data INSIDE the newly created user profile to avoid permission issue).
I just did one few weeks ago. I have 3 profiles (with different Apple ID) and about 1TB data / apps need to move. Only cost me few hours to finish the whole process, not as easy as Migratiion Assiatant, but can still easily be done in Finder anyway.
Thanks for the replies. There is nothing wrong with my current mackintosh drive. I had to do manual transfer only once in past when I had the permissions issue. Otherwise whenever I am installing new osx, I always followed the recommendation of doing fresh install on new drive and use migration assistant afterwards. But I wondered why not just upgrade the osx on existing mackintosh drive if things are stable?
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Then I will say normal OS update is good enough (if not better)
