Hi all, I have an old I-Mac that has been backed up to Time Machine, and has a 1TB hard drive capacity.
We have purchased a new Mac Mini 256GB, but now I can't find a way to use the Time Machine backup to startup the new Mac. Trying to transfer all photos, doc, etc onto an external hard drive. Is this the best way? I do NOT want to lose any photos, or my head is on the chopping block!
All help and advice really appreciated.
Well of course you can't fit 1TB onto a 256 hard drive. So you'll need to buy a 1TB (or bigger) external drive and use that as your startup drive, then move everything over.
You can use Time Machine, but personally I'm not a very big fan of it. I do use it for some things, but not as my primary (important) backup. For that I use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) or SuperDuper. Currently CCC is the best between the two. You'll also be able to boot from CCC which you can't do from Time Machine.
If it were me I'd just grab a new 1TB (or bigger) hard drive and connect it to the iMac, do a full backup of the iMac with CCC and you will be done. Everything on the iMac will then be saved on the hard drive. Then I would use Migration Assistant to copy over all of your browser settings, passwords, ETC to the new Mac. If your new Mac mini is a M1 then the procedure is slightly different. Let me know if this is the case.
The process of making a bootable external hard drive for the M1 is much more specialized than making one for an intel computer. I wrote up instructions for how to do it here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252222611
I also made and included a list of which hard drives work with the M1 (most hard drives don't). You'll see the list in the thread posted above. If you have any questions about the procedure, please post your questions in the thread above, so that everyone in this community can read along and learn by what's happening.
As an option, if you don't need to (or want to) boot from your external drive, then you can always just copy all of your files/photos over to the external drive and access them when ever you need them. With that said, you should always have a (CCC or SuperDuper) backup of your (M1) computer, so that if anything ever happens to the M1. you won't lose any files/photos.
Thanks. How do I do that? Sorry I’m pretty new at this.
Do I copy all the Libraries to the external drive and then delete them off the computer's hard drive?
Do you still have the iMac?
Also, are all of your photos located in your Photos app?
Hi, yes I still have the iMac. The photos are in the Photos app as well as the old iphoto library.
Hi. Thanks this is really helpful. I’ll download CCC.
It is a M1 Mac mini. How does this differ in the transfer?
Transferring to new Mac Mini
