Migration assistant didn't transfer all of my folders

Question

Migration assistant didn't transfer all of my folders

I used migration assistant to move from an older MBP running Mojave to a new MBA running BigSur. Immediately I noticed I had about 100GB more free space on the new Hard Drive than I anticipated. My home folder was copied but renamed, with an _1 appended to it's name, and the Desktop, Documents, Music, Movies, Downloads folder is inaccessible from the finder sidebar (error says "Documents/Desktop etc. can’t be opened because the original item can’t be found.") However, when I navigate to User/Documents folder it shows my files are there. This is true only for the Documents folder, all others I mentioned are empty.

The Applications folder was copied successfully however and works fine. I suspect the issue might be that I first created a new user account on my new MBA with the same name as the one on my old MBP. I told migration assistant to cancel it during the migration process.

How should I best fix this? Do I copy my files manually? I would also like to get rid of the _1 on my user name.

Thanks in advance!

Robert

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.0

Posted on Jan 18, 2021 2:19 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

67,066 points

Jan 18, 2021 4:42 AM in response to robert h blake

I am sure the problem has to do with this duplicate users.

You say you cancelled... exactly what?

When you try to migrate a user with the same name as an existing user, you should have received a warning to that effect, and two or more options, including renaming the user.

Of course, it would have been safer when you created an account in the new system to give it a different name, and them migrating should have gone through unimpeded.

It is not clear at this point if you have one or two accounts.

You could create a new admin user, let's call it "admin"; logout from the present account, login as "admin", and erase the other account. Then migrate again. You need not migrate applications, since they are already there.

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Answer 2

Jan 18, 2021 6:36 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Thank you for your reply!

I have only one user account. When I was migrating, the prompt asked me if it should delete the existing user account and replace it with the one I was creating.

I will try your fix later today and report back.

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Answer 3

Jan 19, 2021 12:54 AM in response to robert h blake

The fix worked, thanks a lot! As suggested I created an administrator account called "Admin", deleted the _1 user and remigrated my files minus the Applications. The _1 user folder remained on the drive root, so I deleted it manually. This is a potential issue, if I'd had more files to transfer they wouldn't fit on the drive since the _1 user was occupying a lot of space. So if you try this fix delete the _1 user folder before remigrating!

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Migration assistant didn't transfer all of my folders

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