Time Machine Migration Disaster

Question

Level 1

10 points

Time Machine Migration Disaster

A Time machine backup was put on a new external drive, and this was used to migrate to a new iMac at their store. So, a dozen or so third-party, expensive applications are missing. No disc drive (Gr-rr). The Photos application is missing, and there are no photos in iPhoto. I still have the older iMac, with all the applications. The Time Machine backup on the drive is at fault... the stuff isn't in there. I also have iCloud storing stuff... but not applications! Any suggestions? Oh BTW Microsoft helped me download & install Office:Mac 2011.

Bought a new laptop and had none of these migration mishaps! Running 10.10.3

Posted on May 21, 2015 3:45 PM

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Answer 1

rkaufmann87

Level 10

140,418 points

May 21, 2015 3:59 PM in response to DrBukk

Some applications such as Adobe software and many times MS Office must be re-loaded manually. This is not a MA issue, it's an issue with the licensing of the software.

As for the Photos app missing, did you check your Applications folder, I find it extremely odd that the app is not on a new machine!

Finally, you have 90 days of free AppleCare, why aren't you on the phone with them????????????

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Answer 2

BrShootr

Level 1

25 points

May 26, 2015 1:39 PM in response to DrBukk

I have the exact same issue. Fresh install of Yosemite on the new machine, imported only the main user into the new system from the Time Machine backup and the Photos.app is gone.

Have you had any luck? Thanks.

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Answer 3

DrBukk Author

Level 1

10 points

May 26, 2015 2:54 PM in response to BrShootr

I did a machine to machine migration and got much better results. All applications are showing on the dock but I have to do some strange navigation in the finder to get to them: devices/My Name's iMac/Macintosh HD... and there reside the applications.

Photo App is in the dock but has no pictures. It cannot locate the iPhoto Library and neither can I. Tonight I will try loading the library on an external disc and see if I can just copy it over. What is frustrating is iCloud is supposed to be storing my photos but this Photo app finds nothing up there.

I truly wish the CD slot wasn't discontinued so I could reinstall my expensive apps from discs. Quark is damaged, Photoshop CS3 quits unexpectedly. They don't support the versions anymore. Office:Mac 2011 is the only one working after I entered a product key. I guess I'll have to buy an external CD drive.

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Answer 4

BrShootr

Level 1

25 points

Jun 2, 2015 10:17 AM in response to DrBukk

Thanks for the reply. It turns out I only had an issue with migrating the Photos.app. It seems Time Machine will not migrate certain apps if it deems they're not compatible with the OS installed on the new system. The final solution to me was to install a fresh install of OS X, add a new user (I called it admin so it'd not interfere w/ the user settings of the old computer), run software update to the new system is in the same revision as the old one and then run migration assistant. Everything moved over just fine.

Also, at least in my case, if I were to browse the Time Machine drive, the folder containing the latest backup did not have all the files. Yet the folder with a date stamp showing the second to last backup did. That's because the very last backup was a backup I ran manually and it had nothing to backup. Why the links were not properly formatted to show the most current contents on the latest backup is beyond me. I could run a clone of the second to last backup as an alternative to using Time Machine for the restore (I have used Carbon Copy Cloner successfully for this).

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