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Discussion on: Migrating to a New Mac for Programmers

 
brandonweiss profile image
Brandon Weiss • Edited

OK, I think I see where the confusion is—I thought you were saying that there was something special you knew about Time Machine backups that allowed them to somehow be migrated/restored faster.

Migrating from a Mac and migrating from a Time Machine backup (assuming the backup is on the same type of hard drive as the Mac) are effectively equivalent. They should take the exact same amount of time. In my case, that was at least 20+ hours because of the overhead of doing a file-level copy on so many files.

My dev folder is ~9 GB and ~340,000 files. It took 15 minutes to zip it and ~3 minutes to unzip it.

With a zipped dev folder, migrating from another Mac took 1 hour and 45 minutes. That means it definitely doesn’t make sense to migrate using Time Machine. It’s not even close… the time it takes to zip and unzip the dev folder is tiny compared to how much time you save during the migration.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Ok got it. My experience of a full restore from a TM backup is of a few hours so I never had to consider a plan B. I'll keep that in mind if I have to

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brandonweiss profile image
Brandon Weiss

👍🏼 Yeah, I’ve heard wildly different numbers on how long migrations take. I know some programmers for who it only takes a few hours and I know other programmers like myself for who it takes a whole day. 🤷🏼‍♂️