soledad penadés

Yesterday I got my new laptop and the technician's idea was to just migrate all my settings and stuff over from the old one for simplicity, using Mac OS X's built-in migration assistant.

I actually didn't want to do this because I liked the notion of a clean slate to get rid of old cruft that I didn't want anymore, but I thought I would give the migration assistant the benefit of the doubt.

TL;DR: it doesn't seem to be ready for migrating a laptop that has been given intensive usage and has plenty of small files (think: the contents of node_modules) and big files too (think: screencasts).

The new laptop is one of those ultra light MacBooks with a USB-C connector, so it doesn't have an Ethernet connector to start with unless you add one via the semidock.

The initial attempt was to migrate data using the wireless network. After three hours and the progress barely changing from "29 hours" to "28 hours" I gave up and started reaching for the Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapters. We stopped the process and set up both computers connected to the same switch with ethernet cables. The estimation was now 4 hours, MUCH BETTER.

I calculated that it would be done at about 20h... so I just kept working with my desktop computer. I had a ton of emails to reply to, so it was OK to not to use my normal environment---you can't use the computer while it's being migrated.

A little bit before 20h I looked at the screen and saw "3 minutes to finish copying your documents" and I got all stupidly excited. Things were going according to plan! Yay! So I started to get ready to leave the office.

Next time I looked at the screen it said something way less encouraging: "Copying Applications... 2 hours, 30 minutes left"

I was definitely not going to wait until 22:30 hours... or even worse, because the estimation kept going up--2 hours, 40 minutes now, 3 hours... I decided to go home, not without wondering if the developer in this classic XKCD cartoon was working at Apple nowadays:

Urgh.

Today I accidentally slept in (thanks, jetlag) and when I arrived into the office, all full of hope and optimism, I found the screen stuck at "359 hours, 44 minutes left".

I turned around to Francisco and asked him: "hey, how many days is 359 hours?" He opened up the calculator and quickly found out.

About 14 days.

And 44 minutes, of course.

I gave the migration "assistant" some more benefit of the doubt and went for lunch. When I came back it was still stuck, so it was time to disregard this "assistance" and call rsync into action.

• I enabled SSH on my old laptop (Preferences - Sharing - Enable remote login)
• Created an SSH key on my new laptop so I didn't have to type in the password of the old one each time. Then enabled the new key with ssh-agent, otherwise ssh doesn't even bother trying to use that key when connecting to remote hosts, and copied and added the new public key to the authorized_keys file in the old computer (the GitHub instructions for generating keys are very good at explaining this).
• rsync was already installed on the computers I think, or maybe I installed it with brew, but I'd swear it was already there
• then to copy entire directories I would use something like rsync -avz --exclude '.DS_Store' sole@oldcomputer.local:/Users/sole/folderIWantToCopy/ /path/to/folder/parent
• except when the folder would have a space in the name, in which case I had to escape it with a TRIPLE BACKSLASH. For example, to copy the VirtualBox VMs folder: rsync -avz --exclude '.DS_Store' sole@oldcomputer.local:/Users/sole/VirtualBox\\ VMs/ .

Whatever wasn't, I copied manually. For example, the Google Chrome and Chrome Canary profiles, because I didn't want to set them up from scratch--you can copy them and keep some of the history without having to sign into Google (some of my profiles just don't have an associated Google ID, thank you very much). Unfortunately things such as cookies are not preserved, so I need to log into websites again. Urgh, passwords.

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support
mkdir Google/Chrome -p
mkdir Google/Chrome\ Canary -p
rsync -avz --exclude '.DS_Store' sole@oldcomputer.local:/Users/sole/Library/Application\\\ Support/Google/Chrome/ ./Google/Chrome/
rsync -avz --exclude '.DS_Store' sole@oldcomputer.local:/Users/sole/Library/Application\\\ Support/Google/Chrome\\\ Canary/ ./Google/Chrome\ Canary/

I also copied the Thunderbird profiles. They are in ~/Library/Thunderbird. That way I avoided setting up my email accounts, and also my custom local rules.

I logged into my Firefox account in Nightly and it just synced and picked up my history, bookmarks, saved passwords and stuff, so I didn't even need to bother copying the Firefox profiles. It's very smooth! You should try it too.

Note that I did all this copying before even downloading and running the apps, to avoid them creating a default profile on their first start.

While things were copying I had a look at the list of apps I had installed and carefully selected which ones I wanted to actually re-install. Some of them I installed using homebrew, other using the always-awkward, iTunesque in spirit and behaviour, App Store. Of note: XCode has spent the whole afternoon installing.

I also took this chance to install nvm instead of just node stable, so I can experiment with various versions of node. Maybe. I guess. We'll see if it's more of a mess than not!

In short, it's now almost midnight but I'm done. I started copying things at 17h, and had a few breaks to do things such as laundry, dishwasher, tidying up my flat, grocery shopping, and preparing and eating dinner, so let's imagine it just took me 4 hours to actually copy the data I was interested in.

Moral of the story: rsync all the things. Don't trust Apple to know better than you.