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I have an M1 MacBook Pro w/ 2 TB of internal storage. It is using about 1.25 TB of that for video/music storage. I bought a M4 Mac Mini with 500GB internal storage and an external drive with 2TB of storage.
How do I migrate my essential data to the Mac Mini and the media storage to the external drive?
TIA
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Migration Assistant is an all or nothing process. What that means is when you launch MA it asks if you want to migrate:
You simply check the boxes of the above items you want migrated and it will migrate all of items in the boxes you selected from either your Time Machine backup External Hard Disk OR your MBP. In your case because your MM only has 512GB of storage my recommendation is to only migrate the Settings and Apps from the MBP to the MM. Then you will have to manually copy and paste all of your data that you stored on the MBP to the External Hard Disk connected to the MM.
To be very honest, you should have purchased a MM with 2 TB of storage that way the migration would have been dead simple. If you are still within your 2 week return period for the MM that is something to seriously consider. By trying to save money by only buying a 512GB MM you are forced to buy an external HD or SSD and manually move your data files which is tedious, error prone and VERY time consuming.
Yes you can move your Photos, Music or Movie Libraries from the MacBook Pro onto an external hard drive.
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support
Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support
However it is wise to use at least two external drives to protect your Mac and Media Libraries.
One drive for the Media Libraries and one drive to backup both the Mac and Libraries.
“How to migrate data using external drive from MacBook Pro to Mac mini?: I have an M1 MacBook Pro w/ 2 TB of internal storage. It is using about 1.25 TB of that for video/music storage. I bought a M4 Mac Mini with 500GB internal storage and an external drive with 2TB of storage. How do I migrate my essential data to the Mac Mini and the media storage to the external drive? TIA”
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Using Another Drive for Backups:
Back Up your Mac:
Be certain you Create a Time Machine Backup of your Mac, so that way you can have something to restore your Mac from, should anything go wrong with reconfigurations (i.e. updates).
Thanks for the info!
While I feel you on the "shoulda got 2TB internal" I have more time than money and while I prefer Macs, I am not doing anything so intensive that I need everything to run super fast, and I am not a gamer. I just want to basically have a home "main frame" I can back everything up to, and then trade in my MBP for an M4MB or even a MBA. And then able to pull up my music files or a movie over my LAN or pull up photos to my AppleTv.
What if after doing an initial migration w/o all the data (which is what I have done), I then set the preferences in my media folders to store their libraries on the external drive, and do the migration again? Is that doable?
Thanks again
How to migrate data using external drive from MacBook Pro to Mac mini?
