Migration Assistant - Insiders Roll Their Eyes About It, Right?

Moving from i7 Win 10 machine to an i7 iMac (just bought). Before I invest more time in Migration Assistant...does it actually work, or is it one of those things that insiders kind of roll their eyes about and whisper that it doesn't really work...?

Here's my hurdle:

On my i7, I have iTunes and thousands and thousands of files, about half of which are from iTunes and the rest courses, lectures, CD rips, etc. They're scattered all over (Dsome course\file1.mp4, Esome other course\lecture01.mp3, Csome\weird\path\a fave CD\somesong.mp3, etc.) In other words, this is not just simple "everything's in my music folder". A decade+ of cruft

But hey, it's all just a big XML file so I'm sure OSX can figure it out when migrating.

OK, you can all stop laughing. Here is my experience, and I'm really just wanting to transfer only iTunes which should be simple:

First off, transferring iTunes from Win to OSX is unsupported and not an option. Bummer.

There is no checkbox for "iTunes" in MA. You can check your Music folder, but of course most of my stuff isn't there. I can track down (through hundreds) of folders and click each one, hoping I get them all, and of course it only shows top-level directories so if you want a 10MB mp3 a few subdirs down, you have to take the whole 300GB top directory that has non-media files...etc.

I'm extremely skeptical all the paths will show up all magically remapped on OSX (since there is no E: drive, etc.) but...

Second, I'll never know because MA died. ""Sorry...An error occurred while transferring your information...some Documents for <my name> could not be transferred". OK, which ones? Can I look at the migration report and...sorry, I'm making people laugh. No further info of course.

Third, it associated all the files it copied over entirely with my Windows user name which is a different name than the one on OSX it does not give you the option to import the files to a my account, just created another one so now that appears on my login.

And fourth, he doesn't even have the files because a du -sh of /private shows 900GB but looking in the new user, his entire account is 57MB. I started to login as the user but it wanted my Apple ID and I refused to further confuse things.

Just wondering if I should stop wasting my time with MA.

I'm thinking the alternative is:

• Nuke the iMac back to factory since I don't know what it's changed. Yeah! In progress now...and then will enjoy 24 hours of Dropbox resync.
• Start up iTunes on the iMac
• Manually bring over my iTunes Library.xml
• redownload all the stuff from the store from the cloud
• a few weeks later when that's done, then go playlist by playlist (there are...500 or so? ) to see what files are missing and manually scp those over one by one and let iTunes place them somewhere

Or is there another way?

I'm thinking the alternative is:

Nuke the iMac back to factory since I don't know what it's changed. Yeah! In progress now...and then will enjoy 24 hours of Dropbox resync.
Start up iTunes on the iMac
Manually bring over my iTunes Library.xml
redownload all the stuff from the store from the cloud
a few weeks later when that's done, then go playlist by playlist (there are...500 or so? ) to see what files are missing and manually scp those over one by one and let iTunes place them somewhere


Or is there another way?

Click to expand...

That's what I would do. The Mac Windows migration assistant is not a cure all and seldom works correctly. The Mac to Mac migration assistant is very accurate and can save hours of work. Just take your time and think out what you want to do before doing it. As you found out, the file management and hard drive management is very different on a Mac than it is for a Windows machine. Do not create more partitions on your hard drive thinking that will help as it will actually cause problems and it's not necessary. Keep everything managed in your home folder under your account and you should be fine. And just like Windows... make backups! ;D

If you need more help with any of this, just give a yell as most of us either still use Windows or were former Windows users. Lots of talent in our forums.

I can only say that I've used the windows migration assistant to bring a number of people over from windows to the Mac, and it has always worked fine for us. That said, people with complex set ups may find that other methods work better for them.

When it comes time to move the iTunes library you might find this article helpful. Having iTunes for Windows consolidate the library first may prove time consuming but will probably take less time than manually searching for all of the files.

And remember that if you nuke the drive that when you reinstall OS X to run MA the FIRST time it's offered. That way it will create an account in the name of your Windows login and put everything there for you in the first place. The reason MA doesn't let you migrate from one account into another is the concept of "ownership" of files. Your account on the Mac didn't "own" the Windows files, so MA won't move them to your account. Pretty straightforward when you think about it.

That's a good point about file ownership. Another reason I hate to recommend using the Windows Migration Assistant as it causes confusion for some new Mac users.

Long story short, I'm not sure file consolidation is feasible...mainly because my C: drive where Users is on the Win side is only 120GB and and the music/video files are scattered over D:, E:, and NAS.

But I will meditate on that...thanks for the advice!