Can Migration Assistant be used to move information From a Bootable external SSD back to the Fusion Drive on my Imac

Question

Level 1

5 points

Can Migration Assistant be used to move information From a Bootable external SSD back to the Fusion Drive on my Imac

A few months ago, I installed a Bootable external SSD using a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M2 SSD on my Retina 5k 27-inch 2017 Imac which runs Ventura 13.6.1. The installation was successful and my system boots from the external SSD without any problems. To do the installation I followed the instructions in an article posted on the Apple Community System found here.

I then used Migration Assistant to move everything that could be moved to the new External bootable SSD. I left the earlier version of Ventura on the Fusion drive but I deleted the data from the Macintosh HD - Data directory on the Fusion Drive. Everything worked fine.

Can anyone advise me if it is possible to move everything back to the Fusion Drive and how I might go about that process?

My end goal is to repurpose the External SSD as a dedicated Time Machine backup if at all possible.

Thank you

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 13.6

Posted on Nov 13, 2023 8:34 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Ian Leckie

Level 4

2,243 points

Nov 13, 2023 8:51 AM in response to Gitt-99

Frankly I would just leave things as they are, as booting from the SSD is working fine for you. Why not just buy another external drive and dedicate that to TM backups? External drives are cheap enough now, and for TM it doesn´t have to be an SSD. A mechanical HDD will do the trick! And you could use the internal fusion drive to archive stuff, for example. Hope this helps you!

Reply

Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,944 points

Nov 13, 2023 8:39 AM in response to Gitt-99

Migration Assistant migrates entire user accounts. You cannot migrate into an existing account and you cannot pick and choose what gets migrated within an account.

So, if you want to migrate the whole account and use that, you can.

If you just want some of the files, you'll have to copy them from external to internal.

Reply

Answer 3

Ian Leckie

Level 4

2,243 points

Nov 14, 2023 9:04 AM in response to Gitt-99

You´re very welcome, Gitt-99! Do make sure that you completely erase your new HDD when you get it! In my experience a lot of brand new external drives have Windows software or similar pre-installed, and these have no business on a drive to be used with a Mac! It´s so long since I´ve connected a new drive for Time Machine, but I think when you connect the drive for the first time you´ll be asked if you want to use it for Time Machine. TM does the rest! Cheers!

Reply

Answer 4

Gitt-99 Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 13, 2023 8:43 AM in response to Barney-15E

What I am hoping to do is migrate the entire user account that is on the bootable SSD back to the Fusion Drive replacing what is on the Fusion Drive? Does this make any sense?

Reply