Migration Assistant insists on copying User Library (50gb)

feargal_hogan wrote

When I enter MA it shows EVERYTHING checked by default and I uncheck most things including most of the user folder items (Documents, Music, Movies, etc) but by default MA shows a checked box at the top of the list named Library, and will not allow me to uncheck it.

Yes, with MA you do not get to itemize. The starwars interface using TM does allow for selectively restoring.

Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/restore-files-mh11422/mac

Just use the normal Time Machine interface instead. If this Time Machine wasn’t connected to this machine, then you can manually go into the Time Machine archive. Just be really careful that you don’t make any changes to it.

I think the "Library" stuff that MA is referring to is the stuff that is in your /Users/account/Library folder -- stuff like e-mail, and application support stuff and whole bunch of misc stuff like Preferences, etc, that you really will likely want sooner or later I would guess.

This is such a miscellaneous hodge-podge of stuff that it's really hard to manually restore it manually and better to let MA restore it.

It would have been best to weed out the stuff you don't want to migrate before the Mojave upgrade, but too late for that now, unless you want to start all over.

In any event, DO NOT copy files from the Time Machine folders directly using Finder or Terminal "cp" commands. The TM stuff has special attributes and permissions that can cause problems. Always use Time Machine software to restore the backups it creates using the normal Time Machine user interface or the "tmutil" command-line utility.

Good luck...

feargal_hogan wrote:

So I've found the answer on StackExchange

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/274163/restore-files-from-time-machine-to-a-different-mac?newreg=9c4054d4832a41a0a28009f58445e78b

You do NOT use the star wars scrolling or the RH timeline.

Instead you enter the TM, and browse the disk, then pick out a dated snapshot, right click on the folder and choose "Restore to .."

That is the Star Wars interface.

Modern versions of macOS using the APFS file system keep "local snapshots" of your entire disk. You can enter Time Machine even if no Time Machine disk is connected. (To be honest, this feature pre-dates APFS, but is now much more robust with APFS.) This feature can cause problems by keeping pointers to deleted files, preventing their deletion from freeing up the disk space they used. It doesn't sound like it would be useful to you since you are trying to restore from a different disk or machine.

Furthermore, when you enter the Time Machine interface, it will merge local snapshots and Time Machine snapshots. I think there is a slightly different colour and shape to the tick marks on the right that differentiate the different types of snapshots.

If you want to see all the special attributes and permissions that TM adds to the files that it saves in the snapshots, then try the following Terminal commands:

cd /Volumes/TM-name/Backups.backupdb/SYS-name/snapshot-name/HD-name
ls -lae@

Then do the following in Terminal:

cd /Volumes/HD-name
ls -lae@

Change all the "-name" items to fit your setup and you will see what I'm talking about...

So, technically you could "cp" the files from TM snapshots to where you wish and then manually correct all the permissions and attributes, but it's a lot of extra work, so why not use TM to do all that extra work for you?

Good luck...

Those are local snapshots.