What’s Left to Do After Migration?
During the setup of the new iMac, I had no issues migrating all my data from the Samsung T5 SSD that I had been using to boot the old iMac, but I was somewhat surprised at how much additional work was necessary afterward. The promise implicit in Setup Assistant’s migration is that you won’t have to reconfigure everything and can just get back to work.
It’s a nice idea, but in reality, there are numerous areas where Setup Assistant simply doesn’t—and probably can’t—save you from additional work. All of these relate to how the underlying identity of the Mac has changed, even if its name and the names of all the drives in play remain the same.
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However, there are also a few instances of apps that have requested permission to something on the old Mac that did not migrate to the new one.
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In our experience, Apple Migration Assistant does not work sometimes, not moving data and not warning about it. Yet, applications like SuperDuper do the work and make perfect clones.
My "favorite" thing that Setup Assistant migration bungles is that it doesn't mirror "Date Added" metadata, but instead just uses whenever the file landed on the new Mac. On one hand it's sort of expected since it would have to involve special care; on the other hand, special care to get all the details right is exactly the job that the migration assistant is supposed to solve.