Transferring Old Mac to new Mac error

[Wayhoo]

My mom is trying to transfer/migrate her old Mac to her new one that she just purchased. Upon using Migration Assistant, it says that she doesn't have enough storage to transfer her old stuff to her knew one, despite them both holding the same maximum capacity of 256GB. It says she's trying to transfer 330GB from her 256GB laptop which makes absolutely no sense as it doesn't even hold 330GB of storage. How do you transfer the data without this issue or how can we fix it? It says she's sending 330GB out of a 256GB Macbook??

[TimedPing]

how about using the good old time machine backup features?

[jaslion]

Its trying to probably transfer cloud files too. Like icloud, dropbox,... basically shortcuts that are 1kb in size but link to an actual file with a large filesize like 300mb or something

[Wayhoo]

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

Its trying to probably transfer cloud files too. Like icloud, dropbox,... basically shortcuts that are 1kb in size but link to an actual file with a large filesize like 300mb or something

So how would we disable the icloud that it's trying to send?

[Wayhoo]

1 hour ago, TimedPing said:

how about using the good old time machine backup features?

I'm not sure how to do that. She downloaded a backup from that and put it on a hard drive but we have the same problem.

[jaslion]

6 minutes ago, Wayhoo said:

So how would we disable the icloud that it's trying to send?

Id first try to investigate what is eating up space with something like treesize

[creat0r]

On 12/15/2023 at 10:54 AM, Wayhoo said:

My mom is trying to transfer/migrate her old Mac to her new one that she just purchased. Upon using Migration Assistant, it says that she doesn't have enough storage to transfer her old stuff to her knew one, despite them both holding the same maximum capacity of 256GB. It says she's trying to transfer 330GB from her 256GB laptop which makes absolutely no sense as it doesn't even hold 330GB of storage. How do you transfer the data without this issue or how can we fix it? It says she's sending 330GB out of a 256GB Macbook??

Unfortunately the Migration Assistant for Mac process is really bad and broken. I've spent many hours of my life over the past 5 years troubleshooting issues and bugs with it on multiple computers. The easiest way that I've found to transfer all of her files and softwares it to plug in an external HDD/SSD/USB-memory and go to Finder, click on the "Go" menu and type in "/users" to go to the users folder. Then go into her user folder, copy all of the folders inside of her user folder, and then paste them into the external SSD. Then set up the new Mac as a new Mac and transfer all of these files to her new Mac by just copy-pasting the folders to the desktop and move the files into their new counterparts if you want. Samsung T7 external SSD will both write and transfer 256 GB in less than two minutes and isn't that expensive if you just need the smallest size. At least this is the best, fastest and especially most stable way that I've found that usually takes less than 30 minutes.