Cleaning Up Old Mac Before Migration

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Cleaning Up Old Mac Before Migration

I have purchased a new MacBook Pro. I currently have a 2007 iMac (running El Capitan) that was set up from my even more ancient MacMini, so I have a lot of very old unused stuff on my iMac.

Since I am not a tech person at all, I was hoping to use Apple's migration feature or install from a Time Machine backup (recommended by an IT friend) to set up my new computer rather than try to do a clean set up and figure out how to get what I want moved over. But I'd like to clean out all the really old stuff on there that I do not use. Is there a recommended app that could help me with that? Or is there a pretty easy way to make sure I delete old apps entirely, as well as hunt for old files/stuff that I would want to delete before migration/Time Machine install?

iMac, OS X 10.11

Posted on Mar 4, 2019 9:30 AM

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MrHoffman

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Mar 4, 2019 11:40 AM in response to balithai

There's no automated means for any migration tool to know what you want to keep and what you don't, in cases such as this.

Any way to create that description is more work than migrating everything and deleting what you don't, or migrating nothing and dragging across just what you want or need.

Because you have to come up with the list, no matter what.

You're left to migrate (just) what you want to keep manually, or to migrate everything using automated tools.

Migration Assistant is the most likely approach to select here, and you can select broad categories of what you want to copy and what you don't. Restoring and booting a Time Machine backup of El Capitan won't directly work here, as El Capitan is too old and can't boot a new Mac system that requires Mojave.

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Cleaning Up Old Mac Before Migration

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