Getting a New Mac for Christmas? A Few Apps to Help Migrate Your Setup

Macs and Mac applications offer so many customizations that it's impossible to remember them all. Quite frankly, it can be easy to forget what's native and what's the result of a setting you've changed in a background utility. Just fine-tuning which apps open specific file types can be challenging if you have to do it from scratch.

Migration Assistant

I've typically used one of Apple's most powerful and functional apps to migrate my setup from one computer to another - Migration Assistant. These days I use Time Machine on an SSD as my source, and it runs incredibly fast. The drawback is that I accumulate cruft, stuff like the wi-fi password to a job I left six years ago and folders in my ~/Library for apps that I uninstalled when Obama was president -- even though I use App Cleaner and Pear Cleaner to do uninstalls. Still, it's worth the trade-off. The cruft really hurts nothing, and the time spent on setup is minimized.

Homebrew

One of the little-known features of Homebrew, a package manager for macOS, is that you can use it for backup and restore operations. The command brew bundle dump creates a text file you can transfer to a new computer, where you can then run brew bundle to reinstall every single app and package straight from the developer. I have 278 CLI packages and 249 casks (apps), and restoring them all would take just seconds to initiate.

Mackup

This app gave me PTSD when I used it in Sonoma before a major bug was discovered. That bug, having to do with moving configuration files and replacing them with symbolic links, has since been fixed. These days, your dotfiles (configuration files) are sanely copied to your choice of cloud services. You can restore a copy of those files on a new Mac, and you won't have to reconfigure your apps one by one.

Supercharge

Supercharge, a multi-featured app from uber-developer Sindre Sorhus, has a feature on its Tools tab to back up the settings for any or all of the apps on your computer. I have never used the "all" feature, but I've copied settings between Macs many times for specific apps using this utility.

Offloader

Offloader can ease the doubt about whether your files have been uploaded to iCloud or not, because it can be hard to tell sometimes. I keep my ~/Documents and ~/Downloads folders synced with iCloud, and they contain some huge sub-folders. Using Offloader, I can be certain that the files exist in the cloud and not just on my machine.

A Few Tips

1. If you use cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc., you will do better by downloading the files from the cloud than trying to restore a local copy and hoping it syncs with what is online. This is a good opportunity to ditch all the individual cloud service apps and consolidate them all with something like Mountain Duck, a single app that can mount multiple remote servers, selectively or all at once. I use it with the services I already mentioned, plus Koofr, Kdrive, Box, and Nextcloud running on my self-hosted server.
2. Don't do anything with your old machine for a week while you test everything out, just in case you need to pull something off it.
3. This is a good time to implement a 3-2-1 backup system: three copies of your data, two different media types, one backup offsite. Some helpful apps to accomplish this are Syncthing, SmartBackup, and a few others, including rsync. For full disk backups, I like SuperDuper.
4. I prefer Time Machine to third-party backup utilities, but there are a few auxiliary apps that can make Time Machine better: Time Machine Editor for setting custom backup schedules (free), Time Machine Mechanic for checking the health of your backups (free), and Backup Loupe for granular control and selective restores beyond what the native app gives you (paid).