Migrating from El Capitan to High Sierra on new Mac - major problems.

krs · Jan 14, 2019

Hi,
I bought a new 2017 MacBook Air which had High Sierra installed.
Wanted to move all files/folders/apps etc. from a 2011 MacBook Pro running El Capitan to the 2017 MBa
Since there was no cable/easy hardware method to connect the two Macs - one has FW800 and USB 2.0, the other only USB 3.0 ports, I took the route via an external drive that had both FW800 and USB 3.0 ports.
So migration was done from the El Capitan backup to the 2017 MBa with High Sierra.
Migration completed fine, but now I have a bunch of problems.
The first ones are:
1. The desktop of the 2017 MBa just shows the HD icon and the High Sierra background - none of the files and folders I had on the El Capitan desktop are shown. Googled for this issue - found others with the same problem but no solution.
2. Then decided to check "Contacts" - none of the contacts I had on El Camino were listed, in fact the only contact was "Apple" (which I didn't have before
3. Checked Apple Mail - nothing there either. When I select "other" after selecting Mail, I'm expected to enter all the mail access info of my ISP again

That's as far as I got - point continuing until I get these issues resolved.

Anyone have any suggestions what is going on?
Migration Assistant seems to be rather useless.

------

Ahhh... I see I only have 1 post.
Thought I had more here - up till now have been posting on ehMac where I was a member for many years, but that forum has pretty much fizzled out.

MacInWin · Jan 14, 2019

Welcome to the forum. You said

So migration was done from the El Capitan backup to the 2017 MBa with High Sierra.

What did you actually do? You said you used an external drive. Did you just copy files/folders there? Which ones? Desktop is a folder in your User account area just like any other folder, so did you copy that folder contents to the Desktop folder on the new system?

Contacts are held in a database, so you would have had to copy the database to put in place of the database on the new system. However, the format of the database may well have changed from El Cap to HS, so a better way would have been to use Migration Assistant and let it do the format change for you. Now, unless you are willing to do it all over again, the best option may be to export the contacts data to vCards to be imported into Contacts on the new machine. I don't know enough about the internals to know if the database structure changed or not, maybe someone else will chime in on that.

Ditto for Mail. Mail is held in a very complex database that holds the messages and enclosures to messages in separate areas. And login data is not going to be moved with what I think you did either.

Is it too late to use Migration Assistant? It really makes the process painless when done properly. To use your external drive, make a TM backup of the old system, then connect to the new and use MA to bring things from that backup. Here is an Apple article on how to do that: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350

IF you decide to give MA a go, one factor to consider is that MA works best if it is invoked at the very first opportunity to do so on a new system, when the first boot of a fresh installation of the operating system asks if you want to migrate and before any accounts are established on the new system. That way, when it is done, your account on the new system will be exactly like your account on the old, including login name and password, email connections, etc, etc. So if you want to do this the right way, you would first make a TM backup of the old system, then reformat and reinstall the OS on the new system back to factory setup and on that very first boot, let MA do its thing.

EDIT: And the reason mail and contacts and desktop didn't show up could very well be that you had an account on the new system already set up. Migration Assistant will NOT overwrite YOUR desktop or mail or contacts with the data from a different machine. It will write that information into an account it is creating, when there is no account there already, hence the "first boot" requirement for it to work well.

krs · Jan 14, 2019

MacInWin said:
Welcome to the forum. You said
What did you actually do? You said you used an external drive. Did you just copy files/folders there? Which ones? Desktop is a folder in your User account area just like any other folder, so did you copy that folder contents to the Desktop folder on the new system?

Thanks for the reply.
I should have been a bit clearer.
I used SuperDuper to make a clone of El Capitan running on the 2011 MacBook pro on the external hard drive (like I have done as a back up many times before)
Then I launched MA on the 2017 MacBook Air and selected the external clone on the hard drive I had just made.
So everything required should have been transferred - I think...

Contacts are held in a database, so you would have had to copy the database to put in place of the database on the new system. However, the format of the database may well have changed from El Cap to HS, so a better way would have been to use Migration Assistant and let it do the format change for you. Now, unless you are willing to do it all over again, the best option may be to export the contacts data to vCards to be imported into Contacts on the new machine. I don't know enough about the internals to know if the database structure changed or not, maybe someone else will chime in on that.

Ditto for Mail. Mail is held in a very complex database that holds the messages and enclosures to messages in separate areas. And login data is not going to be moved with what I think you did either.

Is it too late to use Migration Assistant? It really makes the process painless when done properly. To use your external drive, make a TM backup of the old system, then connect to the new and use MA to bring things from that backup. Here is an Apple article on how to do that: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350

I did what you are suggesting

IF you decide to give MA a go, one factor to consider is that MA works best if it is invoked at the very first opportunity to do so on a new system, when the first boot of a fresh installation of the operating system asks if you want to migrate and before any accounts are established on the new system. That way, when it is done, your account on the new system will be exactly like your account on the old, including login name and password, email connections, etc, etc. So if you want to do this the right way, you would first make a TM backup of the old system, then reformat and reinstall the OS on the new system back to factory setup and on that very first boot, let MA do its thing.

I didn't use MA right at the beginning when I was setting up the new Mac.
Main reason was that I wanted to check first if the 2017 MacBook Air would actually run El Capitan since it was released with a later OS and new Macs will usually not boot into an older OS.

EDIT: And the reason mail and contacts and desktop didn't show up could very well be that you had an account on the new system already set up. Migration Assistant will NOT overwrite YOUR desktop or mail or contacts with the data from a different machine. It will write that information into an account it is creating, when there is no account there already, hence the "first boot" requirement for it to work well.

I had actually nothing set up on the new Mac other than the very basics - language, time zone, just enough to get to the High Sierra desktop.
I then connected the El Capitan external backup to the USB 3.0 port, rebooted holding down the option key, and tried booting into the El Capitan backup on the external hard drive.
That worked fine, so the next step was to boot back into High Sierra and select MA and run that.

PS: I had actually looked at the link you posted.

MacInWin · Jan 14, 2019

I didn't use MA right at the beginning when I was setting up the new Mac.

I had actually nothing set up on the new Mac other than the very basics - language, time zone, just enough to get to the High Sierra desktop.

Too late. To get to the desktop you had to create an account, and once that account was created, MA will NOT migrate certain data into it. That's actually a security practice, as the account you created on the new system is NOT the account from your old system.

Main reason was that I wanted to check first if the 2017 MacBook Air would actually run El Capitan since it was released with a later OS and new Macs will usually not boot into an older OS.

Whether or not it will run does't really matter to the migration. No system elements get moved to the new system, just YOUR stuff. MA doesn't move the operating system. If you want to install ElCap, you will need to do that separately.

OK, so if you are open to wiping the drive on the new system and starting over, boot into the Recovery partition of the new unit, erase and reformat the HD on the new unit, reinstall the OS there and then boot it into the first boot, and at the very first offer to migrate, do so and point to the backup. Let it rip and when done, you can log into the new account which will look exactly like the old account. Some apps don't migrate well, particularly Adobe and Microsoft, so you may need to re-register them in the new system. That may require unregistering them on the old first. I haven't done that in a while so things could have changed.

pm-r · Jan 14, 2019

OK, so if you are open to wiping the drive on the new system and starting over, boot into the Recovery partition of the new unit, erase and reformat the HD on the new unit, reinstall the OS there and then boot it into the first boot, and at the very first offer to migrate, do so and point to the backup.

+1. I would back this suggestion and just start over. Assuming all the required user data is still intact and backed up to migrate from.

PS: And a seemingly very belated welcome krs, and I see you had become a member way back in 2008. You'll bump into some other members from ehmac.ca here as well.

- Patrick
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krs · Jan 14, 2019

MacInWin said:
Too late. To get to the desktop you had to create an account, and once that account was created, MA will NOT migrate certain data into it. That's actually a security practice, as the account you created on the new system is NOT the account from your old system.

Whether or not it will run does't really matter to the migration. No system elements get moved to the new system, just YOUR stuff. MA doesn't move the operating system. If you want to install ElCap, you will need to do that separately.

OK, so if you are open to wiping the drive on the new system and starting over, boot into the Recovery partition of the new unit, erase and reformat the HD on the new unit, reinstall the OS there and then boot it into the first boot, and at the very first offer to migrate, do so and point to the backup. Let it rip and when done, you can log into the new account which will look exactly like the old account. Some apps don't migrate well, particularly Adobe and Microsoft, so you may need to re-register them in the new system. That may require unregistering them on the old first. I haven't done that in a while so things could have changed.

Thanks Jake, that makes sense.
I wish Apple was a bit clearer in their set up info when migration first comes up - what I remember it saying is if you don't want to do the migration right now, you can just continue the set up and do migration later....which is what I ended up doing.

So in the meantime, since the user of that new Mac (family member) already struggled moving from Snow Leopard to El Capitan (loosing iphoto and its capability amongs other things), in the end I decided to wipe the hard drive of the 2017 MacBook Air clean and clone El Capitan from the backup.
That is happening now.

Hopefully this will work out.
Thanks for your explanation why the migration I did intially didn't work out the way I expected it.

MacInWin · Jan 14, 2019

Yep, and you CAN do a migration later, but later is not the same as NOW. I agree the offer to migrate is confusing, and you are NOT the first person to come here and say, "Where did my data go?"

I'm not sure a 2017 MBA can actually run ElCap. Booting from an external briefly is much different from actually running El Cap. Sooner or later something will fail, and spectacularly, I fear.

The move from iPhoto to Photos was a struggle for some, but all the functionality of iPhoto is there in Photos, just in different places. Frankly, I think it would be much lower risk of losing everything if you left it at HS and Photos and the family member spent some time learning to use Photos. I am fearful that when that eventual incompatibility with ElCap raises it's ugly head you or that family member will lost everything.

There was and probably still is a way to migrate from iPhoto to Photos. Here are some links:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-8461
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204887
How to Move an iPhoto Library into Photos for Mac

pm-r · Jan 14, 2019

The move from iPhoto to Photos was a struggle for some,

I did a similar Update/Migration for my cousin over the weekend up to El Capitan on a new to her MBPro, and part of the process said to download some 'Photo library updater.app' or similar name and run it. It worked but was quite slow and gave virtually no feedback as to status or progress.

After everything was done all her photos were still available and both iPhoto.app and Photos.app both worked after each one finished updating whatever library it was they were updating. Again no feedback as to progress.

- Patrick
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MacInWin · Jan 15, 2019

I think there is no need for that Patrick. Photos will import an iPhotos database just fine, leaving behind the original iPhoto database unharmed. It's been a while since I did it, but on the File menu in Photos is "Import." I think all I did was point from there to the iPhotos database and let it run.

pm-r · Jan 15, 2019

MacInWin said:
I think there is no need for that Patrick. Photos will import an iPhotos database just fine, leaving behind the original iPhoto database unharmed. It's been a while since I did it, but on the File menu in Photos is "Import." I think all I did was point from there to the iPhotos database and let it run.

Well, I don't know about that Jake, but I sure in **** wasn't going to muck about and experiment with her photos, especially as Apple said to do it if the photo library was to be used. Sort of like, listening to SWSBO or paying and suffering later. :Smirk:

- Patrick
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MacInWin · Jan 15, 2019

That is really strange, Patrick. Can you tell me where Apple recommended using that tool? When I moved to Photos, when I opened it for the first time it offered to import from iPhoto and indicated that iPhoto would still be there and work. And I did and it did. So I'm befuddled that Apple would recommend an outside tool when Photos will do the job.

krs · Jan 15, 2019

MacInWin said:
Yep, and you CAN do a migration later, but later is not the same as NOW. I agree the offer to migrate is confusing, and you are NOT the first person to come here and say, "Where did my data go?"

So when I ran the migration later and ended up with no files/folders on the desktop and no contacts and no mail - is all that somewhere else on the 2017 Mac or is all that info just lost?

I'm not sure a 2017 MBA can actually run ElCap. Booting from an external briefly is much different from actually running El Cap. Sooner or later something will fail, and spectacularly, I fear.

I was originally looking for a 2015 MacBook Air since it was originally shipped with OS 10.10 and thus would run ElCap for sure.
But the Apple store didn't sell that older one, only the 2017 and even then I had to wait to get one with a 512 GB drive. And I didn't want to buy a 2015 MBa from anyone else.
So right now I'm testing ElCap on the 2017 as best I can.
One snag I ran into is that cloning to the 2017 from a backup with SuperDuper, I found that the mail passwords didn't get transferred - the mail password field is just blank.
Don't know if that is because SD didn't pick that up on the back up or if it's an issue because I'm using a 2017 MBa.
I make backups regularly but I have never had to actually make use a backup before.

The move from iPhoto to Photos was a struggle for some, but all the functionality of iPhoto is there in Photos, just in different places. Frankly, I think it would be much lower risk of losing everything if you left it at HS and Photos and the family member spent some time learning to use Photos. I am fearful that when that eventual incompatibility with ElCap raises it's ugly head you or that family member will lost everything.

Well, we certainly won't loose everything.
For one I have a number of backups all the way to OS 10.6.8 and I'm also keeping the 2011 MacBook pro to be able to boot into 10.6.8
BTW - I must like living dagerously. The 2011 MacBook pro was shipped originally with OS 10.7 but for a number of reasons we needed to run 10.6 on it, and I found out that the 2011 MBp would run 10.6.8 (but not an earlier version of 10.6), so I managed to somehow find a 10.6.8 installer, made a USB 10.6.8 installer and used that 2011 Mac that way for a long time.
Eventually a webinar site we use regularly did not support 10.6 anymore and we were forced to upgrade the OS - decided to go as far as ElCap since that seemed to be the most stable at the time.

There was and probably still is a way to migrate from iPhoto to Photos. Here are some links:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-8461
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204887
How to Move an iPhoto Library into Photos for Mac

When we went from 10.6 to 10.11 on that Mac, we ended up with photos replacing iphotos automatically.
I personally don't use photos or iphoto, but from what I was told and what I read on the net, iphoto had a number of ways to manipulate each photo that as missing in the new version of photo. My family member also tells me there are photos missing in photo that were there in iphoto.
Since I still have the 10.6.8 and even earlier backups, those "missing" photos are not completely lost but trying to find them will be rather time consuming.

ferrarr · Jan 15, 2019

So when I ran the migration later and ended up with no files/folders on the desktop and no contacts and no mail - is all that somewhere else on the 2017 Mac or is all that info just lost?[/QUOTE]
Yes, you should have other users with the credentials from the old accounts (name and password).

MacInWin · Jan 15, 2019

So when I ran the migration later and ended up with no files/folders on the desktop and no contacts and no mail - is all that somewhere else on the 2017 Mac or is all that info just lost?

It's probably there in an account that MA created to hold it. Or it may be in the Shared account. MA tries not to overwrite any data in any existing account, but it will try to move what it can.

When we went from 10.6 to 10.11 on that Mac, we ended up with photos replacing iphotos automatically.

Yep, that was the design from Apple. But I seem to remember that iPhoto was still there in the applications folder, just not the default anymore. You might look in Applications to see if iPhoto is there.

number of ways to manipulate each photo that as missing in the new version of photo.

Not missing, just in a different place. That was the major complaint, that Photos had moved features and functions to a new place while also adding new features and functions. Some folks just don't like change.

My family member also tells me there are photos missing in photo that were there in iphoto.

That shouldn't be that way. Unless the image file was damaged, everything in iPhoto should have been imported. Now those "missing" pictures may not be in the same place as they were in iPhoto because of the way Photos arranges things is different, but they should be in the database somewhere. Have the family member do a more thorough search for them in Photos.

I still don't think the MBA will be happy running the way you are trying to run. But good luck with it.

MacInWin · Jan 15, 2019

ferrarr said:
So when I ran the migration later and ended up with no files/folders on the desktop and no contacts and no mail - is all that somewhere else on the 2017 Mac or is all that info just lost?[/QUOTE]
Yes, you should have other users with the credentials from the old accounts (name and password).

Click to expand...

Bob, if the new account on the new machine that he created is the same as the account name on the old system, the name of the account MA created will NOT be the same as it was. I think MA creates a new username randomly to store the data, or it puts it into the Shared user. Not sure where Desktop/Mail/Keychain go in that case. At least that is how it worked for me when I did that once before.

pm-r · Jan 15, 2019

MacInWin said:
That is really strange, Patrick. Can you tell me where Apple recommended using that tool? When I moved to Photos, when I opened it for the first time it offered to import from iPhoto and indicated that iPhoto would still be there and work. And I did and it did. So I'm befuddled that Apple would recommend an outside tool when Photos will do the job.

I don't remember exactly at what part that notice appeared, but it was during a migration and update from Snow Leopard to El Capitan on a newer working MacBook Pro. Her 2009 white MacBook decided to just up and completely die.

And the tool suggested is Apple's own:
Using the iPhoto Library Upgrader tool

You can use the iPhoto Library Upgrader tool to prepare your library to work with the current version of iPhoto or Photos for OS X.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202358

As I said, I sure as **** wasn't going to doubt what Apple was suggesting and recommending.

I do know that all photos worked whether iPhoto or photos applications were used when running El Capitan on the newer MacBook Pro. Actually my old 2007 15" model until I can find her a good replacement.

- Patrick
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MacInWin · Jan 15, 2019

Ah, OK, the tool is to upgrade the iPhoto database for migration. I had started with iPhoto just before Photos came out, so my database was the one referred to in this:

If your library was created by iPhoto '09 (v8.x) or later, you don't need to use this tool.

krs · Jan 15, 2019

MacInWin said:
I still don't think the MBA will be happy running the way you are trying to run. But good luck with it.

One alternative would be to install Sierra on the 2017 MBa (since it originally came with that) and the use MA.

Seems Sierra from a user point of view is not that different from ElCap and the MBa should be happier with that.

As to features missing in photo vs iphoto, - I will see if I can get some specifics over the next few days.

Rod · Jan 15, 2019

Why not simply reverse clone your SuperDuper copy of your 2011 MBP to the new device. This keeps everything intact as per the old device.
I did this 6 months ago using Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of my wife's 2011 MBP to her new 2018 MBPr.

You simply need to boot the new device from the clone then using SuperDuper select your new device MacintoshHD as Target and the clone as the Source and clone.
I am assuming that SuperDuper works in the same way as CCC and that it is bootable.

MacInWin · Jan 15, 2019

Rod, normally a Mac will not run a release of OSX/macOS that is older than the version it originally came with. So a new 2018 MBP won't run anything but Mojave. Now, you *might* get away with it, but since the OS expects certain hardware capability and certain versions of the firmware, the likelihood is usually pretty small. So, while what you suggest can be done, it's not clear that it would actually work. Actually, I would be surprised if it would boot from the CCC clone of a 2011 machine running Sierra or High Sierra, much less El Cap.