Retina MacBook Pro (no display) to M1 MBP

Hello all,

My mother managed to drop her Retina MBP and now the screen has no power, but the machine still powers on.

She’s taken the opportunity to upgrade to a new M1 MBP and we’d like to get the data moved.

Luckily she use Time Machine so we managed to get setup and recover quite a lot of data through that, but her last backup was exactly a month ago.

Now we’re looking at getting the last months worth of data.

Unfortunately she’s not overly technically minded and is uncomfortable trying to plug her old machine into a monitor (which she’s have to borrow) using the HDMI port and due to lockdown I can’t get over there to do it for her.

So I figured Target Disk Mode would be the next best bet (as I figured I could get her to plug a cable in and hold down T without much confusion!), but now I’ve got confused as to what cables we’d need, with the new I/O on the M1 MBP I don’t want her to pay a chunk of money for the wrong cables or find out that there’s a better solution. And I’m reading conflicting things about whether we could do this with a standard USB-USBC cable as I don’t think TDM supports USB?

Any input and advice would be appreciated!