Restoring a 1.12Tb Time Machine backup to a 512Gb drive

[CPHIL674]

Greetings. I have an M1 MacBook Pro 13 inch. It has the 512 SSD. I am migrating from a 2012 Mac mini which had 1.5 TB of storage. My time machine back up is 1.12 TB. I cannot seem to restore from back up because the Library folder in the Time Machine backup is 462 GB and this will not fit, even if I remove every other selectable option. The checkmark for the Library folder is grayed out and I cannot access the library folder from within the Migration Assistant.

To further complicate things, the 2012 Mac mini has a toasted hard drive, so I cannot transfer information from it. Is there any way around this issue aside from getting a larger hard drive and connecting via USB?

Appreciate your insight.

-Craig

 

[zorinlynx]

You're going to have to just do a fresh install, then copy the data you want from the Time Machine backup. It won't all fit, obviously, so you'll have to prioritize.

 

[MBAir2010]

I had to drag and drop many files from a MacBook Pro 2012 to the MBA2020 265GB
the great thing is that 50GB of music takes under a minute to archive in the MBA_m1!

also
today I dusted off the Mac mini 2012 and had major ribbon ssd problems
after an hour I finally got the mini to read a 1 year old ssd drive with a second ribbon attached to the connector closer to the fan and wire part of the mini. I was going to trash the mini but that weird connection thing worked.
these mini's are not great logic board wise!

 

[Brian33]

I cannot seem to restore from back up because the Library folder in the Time Machine backup is 462 GB and this will not fit, even if I remove every other selectable option.

Wow, congratulations for bringing up an interesting problem. ; )

If I understand correctly, you want to use Migration Assistant to migrate a user from your TM backup to your new machine, but since the user's Library folder is so large it won't fit on your new M1 MBP.

I can certainly understand why you'd want to use MA to transfer the user -- it saves so much time in configuring the account and changing settings for all the apps you use. You might be out of luck, though...

You probably could do it if you could buy or borrow an external drive, though even that seems tedious, and it isn't immediately obvious to me what the best approach is. Would one install macOS on the temp drive, restore user data from TM, prune the Library, and then make a new TM backup? Or is there some better way?

Alternatively, it MAY be possible to delete some of the contents of the Library folder right on the latest Time Machine backup and then do the migration (I'm assuming MA uses the most recent backup on the backup volume). IF my understanding of Time Machine is correct, in theory one could delete files from the latest backup and still have them exist in previous backups, so that should mitigate some of the risk. I'm NOT really recommending you to try it, though. I might try it (partly for the challenge), but only if I knew I had another reliable backup on another drive or didn't care too much about the data.

So I think you will have to create the new user on your M1 without migrating, and manually adjust all the settings and preferences back to the way you want them. Then copy whatever user data you want to keep from the backup "manually."

I suppose Apple has little incentive to solve this situation, as they'll just urge you to buy more internal storage. : (

I'm probably not the only one wondering what in the world is making the user's Library folder 462 GB in size! (Perhaps a lot of Steam games?)