What’s the process?

[willmtaylor]

Fishrrman described a migration technique. Once you get the new machine up and running, you'll need a backup strategy, and the suggestion is to maintain cloned backups. I think there's a place for both; I use Time Machine for incremental backups, and every now and then (I try for every couple weeks), I'll make a full bootable copy with super-duper (CCC works as well). I normally have 3 or 4 bootable copies which I rotate, and every few months I'll make one on a separate drive and save that one indefinitely. This does require more backup drives, but 256 Gb usb drives are cheap, and this is an income producing machine. For a family computer you would want to do roughly the same thing but you can of course adjust the frequency of full copies to suit your needs.

One other suggestion, you probably have a bunch of crud on your old machine that you no longer need. Don't delete it before you migrate; migrate first, make sure everything is OK, and then see if there's some old junk you can get rid of.

Again, thanks for the great advice and suggestions.

 

[Weaselboy]

Are there any drawbacks to this versus using a time machine back up?

You will get the exact same end result. The only reason to go the CCC route is if you want to have the bootable clone available later. If not, there is no reason to mess with CCC.

 

[willmtaylor]

Excellent.

Let us know how you get on with the new iMac.

400GB to transfer. Estimating 1hr remaining at 80 MB/s