I plan on using migration assistant to help my friend move from a 2010 Mac Mini with a 1tb drive to a late 2014 Mini with a 128gb ssd and 1tb hdd. However, there is something I am not clear about. The new Mini has a 128gb SSD, which is the startup drive with Monterey. I created a clean dummy user “macuser” with a password.
The old Mini has a 1tb drive with around 275gb made up of MacOS/apps, user-installed apps and his user folder. Migration assistant transfers only apps, network/system settings and user-data to the new Mini. Clearly there won’t be enough space on the 128gb SSD to hold all that. How does migration assistant handle that? Do we have to do anything special when starting migration assistant?
Thanks for any help.

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richorlin

Check out folder sizes for the User folder. I’d head right towards music/media files and photo libraries.

Plan to manually transfer some or all of these to an external drive.

Then see “ Select the information to transfer “ here:

[support.apple.com]

and deselect the stuff that you just manually transferred.

MI will be a disaster in this situation. You either need to set up everything manually or join the two drives into a fusion drive before migrating imo. If the friend isn't a power user, I'd go with the fusion drive option.

It would be nice if MI would import the apps onto the SSD and the rest onto the hdd, but it doesn't do that.

Don't make a Fusion drive. They're a bad stopgap created to blow time until SSDs got cheap enough to replace HDs.

If you can do the surgery, swap out the 1TB HD for a SSD.

Otherwise, there are tricks for hosting the system and apps on the SSD and the home folder on the hard drive. You can, for example, copy the user's home folder onto the hard drive and then create a new user account for that user on the SSD using your "dummy" admin account and then use the hidden Advanced options in the Users & Groups panel to map the new user account to the home folder on the hard drive instead of to the SSD.

Either way, make sure there's a VERY good ongoing backup.

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