migration assistant: migrating to a smaller Mac
I bought a 2017 edition Macbook Air to replace my husband's ancient Macbook Pro. Migration Assistant is not going very well. It turns out I did not do my homework very well, and the new Mac has much less storage space than the old Mac. I think that a lot of what's on the old computer is no longer needed, so we can probably get by with less space.
Yesterday I tried to do Migration Assistant between the two, choosing only Computer & Network Settings + Documents. Then I chose to migrate over only a subset of the documents. The Migration Assistant silently failed. It ran for 4 hours and at the end nothing had been migrated. The old Mac showed some errors of things like Printer Drivers that could not be transferred. The new Mac was hung and had to be power cycled.
Today I am thinking of trying this instead, and I wanted to see if I could get some expert advice first.
- Run Migration Assistant to transfer over Computer & Network Settings and Applications. I'll deselect Documents.
- After Migration Assistant runs, look through the Applications folder and delete the apps that transferred that are no longer needed.
- Copy all of the files on the old Mac to an external disk.
- Attach the disk to the new Mac and copy those over just using Finder.
Questions: Will I run into any troubles doing this? I'm wondering if there are things in the ~/Libraries folder that won't transfer well this way. Also, if I can use Migration Assistant to pick and choose which Applications to migrate, that would be great, but I'm not sure if that will be possible.
Thanks for any advice.