Transfer (clone) mid-2012 to new Mac Studio Max

[heden]

Hi everyone

Apologies if this is not the right place to ask this but Im at wits end and cant seem to find the way to do this whole process. There's superduper, carboncopycloner, migration assistant, timemachine - and all very confusing to choose which option makes sense for my case scenario.

If anyone could share their experiences with cloning to new M1 from old mac, I'd really, really appreciate it. My mid-2012 is running on Sierra and want to clone the whole thing to my new mac studio. Im not too bothered with whatever caveats this may come with (fresh/clean install is not really ideal for me), and am prepared that it wont fare absolutely perfect as far as software and re-authorisations of plugins goes.

Im in Audio and very dependent on the way everything works on my old mac to put it very brief.

Thanks!

 

[chrfr]

Hi everyone

Apologies if this is not the right place to ask this but Im at wits end and cant seem to find the way to do this whole process. There's superduper, carboncopycloner, migration assistant, timemachine - and all very confusing to choose which option makes sense for my case scenario.

If anyone could share their experiences with cloning to new M1 from old mac, I'd really, really appreciate it. My mid-2012 is running on Sierra and want to clone the whole thing to my new mac studio. Im not too bothered with whatever caveats this may come with (fresh/clean install is not really ideal for me), and am prepared that it wont fare absolutely perfect as far as software and re-authorisations of plugins goes.

Im in Audio and very dependent on the way everything works on my old mac to put it very brief.

Thanks!

You can’t clone it. The Mac Studio cannot run Sierra. You can migrate your data following the migration steps when you first set up the computer, or you can manually copy files from one to the other, but a clone is out of the question.

 

[Fishrrman]

You CAN "clone the 2012's drive", but be aware that setup assistant will migrate only the relevant items "from the cloned backup" to the new Studio. The OS itself will be "left behind".

What to do:
1. Get an external USB3 drive
2. Format it to HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format)
3. Download SuperDuper for this job. It's FREE to download and use for 30 days.
4. Use SD to clone the 2012 drive to the external drive.
5. When the new Studio arrives, take it out of the box, BUT DO NOT TURN IT ON UNTIL YOU CONNECT THE BACKUP !
6. Connect the backup and power-on the Studio for the first time
7. Start clicking through setup. At the appropriate moment setup assistant will ask if you wish to migrate from another drive. YES, you want to do this
8. "Point the way" to the backup, then give setup assistant time to "digest" everything (it will take some time, be patient)
9. Setup assistant will present you with a list of stuff to migrate. I'd just leave everything checked, and let setup assistant get to work.
10. The migration will take some time, again, be patient.
11. When done, you should see your login screen, as it was before.

There's nothing complicated about this, but again, I recommend that you DO NOT power on the new Studio until the backup is connected.
You don't want to create a new account, and then try to migrate your OLD account -- you can end up with permissions problems.

Good luck.

 

[F-Train]

My mid-2012 is running on Sierra...

I would suggest that you raise this on the forum VI Control, where there are a fair number of people running old versions of MacOS due to their use of 32 bit audio plugins, etc. Some of these people may be making a transition to an M1 Mac and can talk about how they handled it, given that M1 Macs don't support their old operating system nor some of the plugins that they use.

 

[heden]

You CAN "clone the 2012's drive", but be aware that setup assistant will migrate only the relevant items "from the cloned backup" to the new Studio. The OS itself will be "left behind".

What to do:
1. Get an external USB3 drive
2. Format it to HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format)
3. Download SuperDuper for this job. It's FREE to download and use for 30 days.
4. Use SD to clone the 2012 drive to the external drive.
5. When the new Studio arrives, take it out of the box, BUT DO NOT TURN IT ON UNTIL YOU CONNECT THE BACKUP !
6. Connect the backup and power-on the Studio for the first time
7. Start clicking through setup. At the appropriate moment setup assistant will ask if you wish to migrate from another drive. YES, you want to do this
8. "Point the way" to the backup, then give setup assistant time to "digest" everything (it will take some time, be patient)
9. Setup assistant will present you with a list of stuff to migrate. I'd just leave everything checked, and let setup assistant get to work.
10. The migration will take some time, again, be patient.
11. When done, you should see your login screen, as it was before.

There's nothing complicated about this, but again, I recommend that you DO NOT power on the new Studio until the backup is connected.
You don't want to create a new account, and then try to migrate your OLD account -- you can end up with permissions problems.

Good luck.

THANK you Fishrrman

Does it have to be a USB3 external? I have several Samsung T5 and T7 SSD externals (USB-C), one of them still has 500gb available space and my mac storage is only 256gb on the mid-2012. I remember I formatted that one to Extended with Journaling enabled when I first got it. So Im thinking, would that suffice?

 

[heden]

I would suggest that you raise this on the forum VI Control, where there are a fair number of people running old versions of MacOS due to their use of 32 bit audio plugins, etc. Some of these people may be making a transition to an M1 Mac and can talk about how they handled it, given that M1 Macs don't support their old operating system nor some of the plugins that they use.

I will head over to that forum right away and see what I can find, thx a bunch F-Train!

 

[chrfr]

THANK you Fishrrman

Does it have to be a USB3 external? I have several Samsung T5 and T7 SSD externals (USB-C), one of them still has 500gb available space and my mac storage is only 256gb on the mid-2012. I remember I formatted that one to Extended with Journaling enabled when I first got it. So Im thinking, would that suffice?

It’s an entirely unnecessary step to clone the existing disk to another drive before migrating to the new computer. Just start up the new computer and follow the instructions in the new Mac’s setup assistant to move your data.
However, do not expect that your music apps and plugins will work in the new operating system, and especially not without reactivating them.

 

[4sallypat]

@chrfr is correct - easiest is to use Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant from the older Mac.

Using Setup assistant on the Studio connected to the 2012 is best handled using Apple's bidirectional TB3-TB2 adapter.
Wired Ethernet is the next best.

If Setup assistant does not work, you can always use Migration Assistant utility.

And don't use wireless - it's prone to fail and stop!

 

[heden]

@chrfr is correct - easiest is to use Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant from the older Mac.

Using Setup assistant on the Studio connected to the 2012 is best handled using Apple's bidirectional TB3-TB2 adapter.
Wired Ethernet is the next best.

If Setup assistant does not work, you can always use Migration Assistant utility.

And don't use wireless - it's prone to fail and stop!

Thx 4sallypat! So I just use a standard ethernet cable like the one I have connected to my router (and like the yellow one in above video)?

 

[4sallypat]

Thx 4sallypat! So I just use a standard ethernet cable like the one I have connected to my router (and like the yellow one in above video)?

Yes, the Ethernet cable from your 2012 connected to your router and your Mac Studio connected to your router is the next fastest way.

I just did that Ethernet transfer from my M1 Mini to Mac Studio and worked - all 200GB transferred within 15 minutes.

If you use the TB3/2 adapter, it would be much faster...

 

[heden]

You CAN "clone the 2012's drive", but be aware that setup assistant will migrate only the relevant items "from the cloned backup" to the new Studio. The OS itself will be "left behind".

What to do:
1. Get an external USB3 drive
2. Format it to HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format)
3. Download SuperDuper for this job. It's FREE to download and use for 30 days.
4. Use SD to clone the 2012 drive to the external drive.
5. When the new Studio arrives, take it out of the box, BUT DO NOT TURN IT ON UNTIL YOU CONNECT THE BACKUP !
6. Connect the backup and power-on the Studio for the first time
7. Start clicking through setup. At the appropriate moment setup assistant will ask if you wish to migrate from another drive. YES, you want to do this
8. "Point the way" to the backup, then give setup assistant time to "digest" everything (it will take some time, be patient)
9. Setup assistant will present you with a list of stuff to migrate. I'd just leave everything checked, and let setup assistant get to work.
10. The migration will take some time, again, be patient.
11. When done, you should see your login screen, as it was before.

There's nothing complicated about this, but again, I recommend that you DO NOT power on the new Studio until the backup is connected.
You don't want to create a new account, and then try to migrate your OLD account -- you can end up with permissions problems.

Good luck.

Will doing these steps attempt to transfer Sierra over to new mac studio or will Monterey still be the OS? Really would not like Sierra to follow with migration 😅

 

[chrfr]

Will doing these steps attempt to transfer Sierra over to new mac studio or will Monterey still be the OS? Really would not like Sierra to follow with migration 😅

Migration assistant will not copy the operating system over, just your applications/settings/documents. And again, it is unnecessary to clone the drive to an external disk before doing this.

 

[CodeSpyder]

One possibility. You could do a clean start up on your new Mac, then boot up your old one in target disk mode. It'll act like an external hard drive and you can pull over what you want from your old Mac.

 

[PianoPro]

Another way to use Migration Assistant is to connect an external drive with a Time Machine backup on it. Then you don't even need your 2012 Mac. This is what I did with my 2010 Mac Pro. The advantage of this is that I could control what files were on the Time Machine backup, and therefore what files were transferred to the Mac Studio using Migration Assistant. Otherwise you have very little control over what gets copied. Since I have 5 HDD/SDD's in my 2010 Mac Pro that allowed me to selectively copy what I wanted from some of those after the initial setup because I didn't want everything on the Mac Studio internal SSD, which of course wouldn't have fit anyway.

BTW, although the Migration Assistant is not supposed to copy over the old OS it can and will copy over some files from an old OS which are not the same files as used by Monterey, and that can cause some problems that may need to be sorted out later. I still think it is worth doing rather than copying everything by hand and resetting up everything from scratch.

 

[Fishrrman]

Other replies noted above.
I recommend using a CCC or SD cloned backup because:
- when the source (for setup assistant) is a drive, it's just a matter of "connect and go" (that is, there's the possibility a user could run into connection problems with target disk mode, ethernet, etc.)
- I've read reports from others that using a cloned backup with setup assistant goes faster than if one uses a tm backup. Just "what I've read", I have no direct personal experience, I've never used time machine, not even to experiment with it.

My opinion only.

 

[CocoaNut]

Hi all,

I have a slight variant of the OP's issue. I have a MacPro5,1 running Mojave and just got a MacBook Pro 14", and decided that I will use the new MBP as my main machine until I buy a Mac Studio. My Mac Pro has obviously accumulated lots of crud over the years (was repeatedly updated from 10.7 all the way to 10.14), so I'd like to somehow selectively move over the databases/libraries to my new Mac and start fresh.

Migration Assistant has however disappointed me. It either moves an entire user library, without allowing too fine control over its content, or nothing at all. I've been looking at how to solve this for two days now, without much success. Is there an app for that...?

To clarify:

• The Mac Pro has running Time Machine backups on a Drobo
• I've made .dmg images with CCC of both internal drives on the Mac Pro, on external USB drives
• Both Macs are connected via Ethernet
• I need most to move my iPhoto/Photos and my iPhone/iPad backups
• I've successfully moved the iTunes music with Opt-click, together with relevant playlists

One problem I have is that my Photos library is located on the second drive, and not on the main boot drive, which is nearly full. Now I'm unsure if M.A. is aware of this, because the library's size is much larger than what M.A. reports in the Images folder.

Any pointers are very welcome!

 

[PianoPro]

Migration Assistant has however disappointed me. It either moves an entire user library, without allowing too fine control over its content, or nothing at all. I've been looking at how to solve this for two days now, without much success. Is there an app for that...?

To clarify:

• The Mac Pro has running Time Machine backups on a Drobo

What I did was add exclusions to Time Machine (use options button) to not back up those files or folders I didn't want transferred to my Mac Studio from my Mac Pro. Then run Time Machine once before using it to move your files with Migration Assistant. The exclusions will all be added at the end of any previous existing exclusions so you can easily remove them again after you use MA to do your transfer.