Migration Assistant: complete fail
My wife just purchased a new MacBook Air. I've been looking forward to firing it up to check out the solid state disk. I figured I would do this the Apple Way: use Migration Assistant to move her files and applications from the outgoing MacBook to the new machine. I started over seven hours ago. This is how it went.
In any case, the bottom line here is that the Migration Assistant user experience is absolutely rock bottom. To sit for 5.5 hours in a single state with nothing more than a pinwheel to suggest anything was proceeding as designed is not just poor, it's completely broken.
- Over WiFi. The machines connected, and got to the stage where the Air was "Preparing information...". I think I gave it about 20 minutes, and with no progress I figured it was going to be slow over WiFi. I quit the process.
- Over Ethernet using the Time Capsule as a switch. I moved both machines to the office and wired them up. I gave it a short while, but the MacBook claimed it lost the connection. On a wired LAN. Incredible.
- I fired it up again in the same configuration, watched the "Processing information..." pinwheel spin for a while, and then quit.
- I had read that a direct Ethernet connection could be made between the two machines: apparently a standard cable would be sufficient, a crossover cable would not be required. This time, I let the process go. And go. But after 5.5 hours "Processing information...", I'd had enough. Frankly, there was no indication that it was proceeding normally, and for all I knew one or both sides had crashed or was sitting in an infinite loop.
In any case, the bottom line here is that the Migration Assistant user experience is absolutely rock bottom. To sit for 5.5 hours in a single state with nothing more than a pinwheel to suggest anything was proceeding as designed is not just poor, it's completely broken.
Labels: Mac OS X, MacBook Air
posted by Paul A. Hoadley at 22:31
9 Comments:
I had your same experience. I had a Macbook running Leopard and I was going to use migration assistant to transfer data and settings to my new MacBook Air. I tried to do it wirelessly and let it sit for an hour saying processing information. No details, just that message and a spinning pinwheel. The I connected the machines via ethernet - left it for 5 hours, just as you did - same situation, it still said processing information 5 hours later. I'm going to try one more time and leave it overnight and then if that fails - do a Time Machine backup and restore.
Hi - Really late to the party, but I have used MA literally dozens of times, with a 100% success rate and love it to bits. The number one criticality is to ensure that the two machines have exactly the same revision of the utility. The newly arrived Mac may be a version or 2 behind, so my process with a new Mac is to complete the out of the box set up, then immediately update. Then I use MA afterwards. Best is make the donor machine a FW slave, next best is direct ethernet cable, but all the methods seem to work ok.
Steve
I spent all weekend trying to migrate everything from my Macbook Pro to my new Macbook Air via the ethernet adapter. It would repeatedly "lose" connection with teasingly few minutes left on the transfer. What finally worked was using the time machine backup via usb. It was lightening fast. I used firewire 800 to make a backup of my MBP (took about 4 hrs for 130GB) and then it took only a few hours to get the data on to the Air - using migration assistant. My conclusion is that ethernet does not work with migration assistant - use time machine and usb. BTW, I've done countless migrations via firewire and never had any issues.
Hi! Just to help others comming in here: Apple support said to me three years ago "It is common wisdom here, firewire works but WiFi, ethernet are shaky and should be avoided!". Sad they suck at telling you up front or, why not debug wifi/ethernet! Conclusion, play safe and use firewire or migrate from TimeMachine backup.
FFS, I am having similar issues. It's been saying "Transferring documents for the user x" for the last 5-6 hours, even though user x's home folder is only 4-5 GB. And before it transferred another user account of 40-50 GB in much less time. Seems to be stuck now. No "cancel" button. What do I do?
Same guy again,
I eventually forced a shutdown on the source MacBook Pro, erased the disk and reinstalled Mac OS X on the MacBook Air and then bought a USB-Ethernet adapter from Apple. Still, the migration failed at about 6 minutes from the finish line, over a direct connection. Pathetic, really fucking pathetic software. That is nothing but a fucking insult from Apple, you pay so much money and they give you a piece of crap, right in your face.
Had the same problem and fixed it easily. The ethernet adapter does not work for the migration assistant and neither does doing it wirelessly - tried it many times and failed. I finally made a time machine backup of my macbook pro and then used migration assistant on the air to move everything over - it was very fast and worked the first time. In my past experience, migration assistant worked flawlessly over firewire - I never had an issue - but since there is no firewire on the air.... Hope this saves someone a lot of headaches.
I've had that same experience trying to migrate from a MBP 15" to a somewhat newer MBP 13" and from a MBP 13" to a newer. Power save off, latest updates of everything. Same version of Snow Leopard. Nothing works.
After about 6-8 hrs the process stalls. Right now it's been on 22 minutes left for like three hrs.
I've tried both using standard Ethernet, crossed and Firewire. It really, really sucks. I've done this like ten times before with older versions of OS/X and other Macs without problems. Have the people at Apple screwed up on this version?
I just did a successful migration with a Cat-6 ethernet cable. The key was to update the new MacBook Pro so both systems had identical systme updates. It had failed 4 times previous and then worked like a charm after the update! Thanks for the help.
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