I bought a new mac last night and I believe it has Ventura on it. My old machine is running Catalina. Can I plug in the Catalina machine's Time Machine to the new mac and do a restore from backup so that the new mac gets set up to be an exact copy of the old, running Catalina and all the apps (and docs) like it was on the old machine?
Before lazily posting I should've searched.. turns out the new ARM chip doesn't support x86_64 architecture. So, the oldest one could go is Big Sur. While this doesn't help my scenario, if anyone ever wanted to, they could create a bootable USB stick of Big Sur and install that...
I'm not trying to transfer my documents... I want to image the new machine as the old.. I am wondering if I can boot the new Ventura mac into recovery and say restore from backup, with the backup being the Catalina backup. Thanks.
belcantoCali wrote:
Just to be clear, I'm not looking to "migrate" data to the the new OS. I want the new machine to be an image of the old, so running the same OS etc. as the old machine.
In that case, no, that's not possible. For one thing, you can't run a version of macOS that is earlier than what a Mac shipped with.
Just to be clear, I'm not looking to "migrate" data to the the new OS. I want the new machine to be an image of the old, so running the same OS etc. as the old machine.
Actually as I already said, you cannot run a version of macOS earlier that what a Mac shipped with. Since your Mac shipped with Ventura, you can't run Big Sur on it. But congrats on the Best Answer.
image new mac with old mac's time machine backup
