Migration Assistant and External Hard Drives

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Migration Assistant and External Hard Drives

I’m getting ready to move from my old iMac (Monterrey) to my new Mac mini (Ventura) and am planning to use Migration assistant. I have two questions.

1) Can I specify to transfer everything on my old iMac except for the external hard drive. It’s big, and mostly archival, I plan to just unplug it and plug it in to the new mac-mini.

2) When my Photos library is transferred, will it become the new target for iCloud to store full sized originals? (It is on the internal drive of my old iMac)

Thanks!

Greg

iMac 27″, macOS 12.6

Posted on Feb 1, 2023 4:07 PM

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Answer 1

AnnieL2

Community Specialist

Feb 4, 2023 11:47 AM in response to simpsong00

Greetings simpsong00,

We’d like to direct your attention to the following article that goes over using Migration Assistant and also some screenshots - Move content to a new Mac

As for the external hard drive, given that it is an external hard drive, the way you’d get that data over to the new Mac is to connect the external hard drive to your new Mac. Unless you’re not planning to use your external hard drive with your new Mac.

As for using iCloud Photos, you can control the settings for that. Given that iCloud is a syncing service it will sync photos to all devices signed in with your Apple ID, but you an have multiple computers/devices store full size versions of your photos. Set up and use iCloud Photos

On your Mac

1. Choose Apple menu  > System Settings or choose Apple menu  > System Preferences.

2. Click Apple ID.

3. Click iCloud in the sidebar, then select Photos.

Thanks.

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Answer 2

simpsong00 Author

Level 1

19 points

Feb 4, 2023 12:58 PM in response to AnnieL2

Thanks!

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Migration Assistant and External Hard Drives

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