New (to me) Mini in the house, and it looks like a pretty quiet week. I'm thinking about the best way to get a clean, fresh start. I've probably used Migration Assistant for the last couple of transitions to a new machine. However, in the last year I've noticed that Finder Search doesn't always find things, even by filename. I have tried various "rebuild" commands found with a web search, but the problem seems to return a day or two later.

Besides the Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud apps, I only use a half-dozen other applications and I feel confident I can find and download new versions. I'll be going from High Sierra to Ventura. I want to preserve all my old Mail, though. And there are probably settings and passwords that I am not thinking about but don't want to lose. On the other hand, I know I've got various versions of Adobe software, and config and settings files for those, that haven't been used in many years.

I'm thinking the old Mini will become my "TV-watching" machine, so it'll be on the same network, only a few feet away, if I should need to retrieve some file later.

Should I do Migration Assistant or start a new digital life from scratch?

Migration Assistant hasn't worked for me in years.

---

Ukulele music I couldn't find anywhere else.
[colquhoun.info]

While a proper manual-migration would preserve your email and Messages and other stuff, that takes a lot of work and the Migration Assistant is painless.

If you're not experiencing any odd/excessive crashes or other issues that might be resolved with a clean new user account, you might as well do the migration.

...With those apps as your main ones, I'd consider migrating just the user account and installing everything else from scratch. Not critical if you're not having problems that might migrate over, but it's a good feeling to have all the old cruft left out of the /Applications and /Library folders.

---