New MacBook time machine restore or migration assistant?

[gregs656]

I have a 2019 MBP on Monterey and a 2012 MBP running Catalina. I can't upgrade the OS on the old one because of some formatting issue with the SSD in there - I had to mess around to get Catalina on there and gave up when I'd have to do it all again.

I'm after advice on what the best approach is. I understand migration assistant will migrate my files, does it do software as well? Or should I do a TimeMachine backup and restore it on the new machine (this is what I've done in the past).

[somouk]

Migration assistant leaves the OS in place I believe and would be the better option I think.

[JimbobVFR]

Migration assistant is definitely the best option IMO.

I used it to transfer from a 2012 MBP on Catalina to a 2015 5K iMac and was very impressed with the results.

I used an external hard drive for a time machine backup of the old Mac and then used that TM backup as the source for migration assistant.

I was a bit concerned about my installation of VM Ware Fusion as it was an utter ball ache to obtain the free for personal use licence key but all of my software was transferred over with no issues.

Edited by JimbobVFR on Friday 17th June 13:08

[gregs656]

Thanks both. I will give migration assistant a go.

[gregs656]

Round this out by saying it was all straight forward with migration assistant.