This post is coming to you from a Mac manufactured in this decade, but it took far more fiddling with software and cables and more swearing at them than I ever expected to make that possible.

The fault here was Apple’s Migration Assistant, a tool to move your apps, files and settings from one Mac to another that I’d found so faultless in the past that in 2010 I touted it to Washington Post readers as “fantastically helpful.” I expected the same seamless experience this time, but after connecting my old iMac to my new M1 Mac mini via Ethernet (weirdly enough, Apple’s instructions only mentioned WiFi), launching Migration Assistant on each computer, having it add up all of the hundreds of gigabytes of data to be moved, and beginning that process… that progress stopped after about three hours without explanation.

After further fruitless trial and error, I settled on plan B in Migration Assistant: Transferring my data from a Time Machine backup. After a strange wait for it to see the backup volume, Migration Assistant informed me that it was “Starting up…”

Two hours later, it was still “Starting up…”

Nine hours later: still “Starting up…”

(Memo to Apple: This is one fantastically uncommunicative app here. Can’t you hire some underemployed English majors to write more informative status messages for it?)

Then I remembered that Migration Assistant can also restore from a disk image. And that I could create a new clone of the old iMac’s SSD using the same tool I’d downloaded three years ago when I transplanted the SSD into that aging computer.

I launched Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper for the first time since 2018, had it create a new disk image in a partition on my backup drive, and then plugged that drive into the new Mac mini. I set Migration Assistant to transfer from that, it once again added up all of the files to be moved. And this time, it not only started the job but finished it, rewarding me with a “Migration Complete” message the next morning.