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GummoMarx Author

Level 1

8 points

Can Migration Assistant move non-Apple applications to an external SSD?

I own a 2017, 27-inch iMac (fusion drive) with MacOS Mojave (10.14.6). I just bought a VisionTek 1TB SSD Thunderbolt external drive to use as both a bootable drive and backup device. The SSD external is formatted as APFS. I manually installed Mojave on the SSD as a "separate volume" (not partition) within the SSD. The other volume would contain my documents.

1) Can Migration Assistant copy all my applications (e.g. Adobe Cloud apps like InDesign, and Microsoft Office apps, etc) so that I can use them without reinstalling them from scratch on the external SSD like I did with Mojave?

2) Or do I need something like Carbon Copy Clone?

3) Which volume of my SSD should the applications be placed, the one where I installed Mojave or the other volume? And why?

Thank you.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.14

Posted on Aug 16, 2020 2:25 PM

Top-ranking reply

Sean Dale1

Level 5

4,439 points

Posted on Aug 16, 2020 4:17 PM

If you boot from the external drive and then run Migration Assistant it will import your Apps to the right place. No need to get creative, it's all pretty straightforward.

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Can Migration Assistant move non-Apple applications to an external SSD?

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