I have a new iMac and am exploring Migration Assistant to transfer files , passwords etc. I cannot move everything as the new iMac only has 256Gb of storage. How do I bring across only part of the content and how do I separate it out using MA? Or do I have to revert to hard drives?
iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15
MA will give you choices and you can deselect certain types: Settings, user data, apps ... You can interrupt the process if the choices don't suit you. But having chosen a smaller internal drive than your older drive is going to be problematic.
It's not a matter of reverting to hard drives, that's the choice you made for yourself. If you want to keep all the data and there is no room on your internal disk, you have no choice other than external storage: HDDs, SSDs or cloud storage. iCloud Drive is not a long term autonomous storage solution, it's an interactive service.
You can always use an external HDD or SSD as intermediary to copy and paste user data using Finder. That's generally where the large amounts of data are.
MA will give you choices and you can deselect certain types: Settings, user data, apps ... You can interrupt the process if the choices don't suit you. But having chosen a smaller internal drive than your older drive is going to be problematic.
It's not a matter of reverting to hard drives, that's the choice you made for yourself. If you want to keep all the data and there is no room on your internal disk, you have no choice other than external storage: HDDs, SSDs or cloud storage. iCloud Drive is not a long term autonomous storage solution, it's an interactive service.
You can always use an external HDD or SSD as intermediary to copy and paste user data using Finder. That's generally where the large amounts of data are.
Please return the computer and buy one with the same or greater storage as your old computer. Migration Assistant will fail as there is inadequate storage on the new Mac. Once you have the correct computer please follow the steps in Setup Assistant and Migration Assistant
Thank you for your reply! I understand that my new iMac is way down on capacity but I am planning to use SSD drives for most of the content in future. I was hoping to be able to use MA to enable transfer of things like passwords , applications etc rather than the bulk of files, which is why I raised my question. I now think that it might be easier for me to remove the large bulk of photos and videos and files before transferring the remaining entire contents. Thanks again.
MIGRATION ASSISTANT QUERY
