I'm having trouble using the Apple Migration Assistant. Has anyone had experience with this?

No, I haven't switched over myself, but I just helped my mother buy a Mac Mini. I have her old PC set up elsewhere and tried giving the migration assistant a go. It seemed to be an extremely mixed bag. It listed about 300GB of files that it found and automatically selected. It also indicated that it would bring over things like her iTunes content, web favorites, and all sorts of other user account related things.

But when I ran it, it took around three minutes. None of the music or media was transferred, and it didn't appear as though any of her documents were even transferred. What's the deal?

I did select an option at the end to "skip this user." Is that what did it? Do I really have to create an entirely new user account on the Mac in order to get this to work? Why can't they migrate into the existing account?

IME, the best scenario is to create a generic admin user and use that to migrate a different user over. Once you have everything done, you can change that migrated user to an admin if you'd like and then get rid of the original account. Or keep that one for yourself.

Your run most likely did nothing because of the skip option.

While I've used the feature a number of times, it does have its quirks. Such as issues if the new user has exactly the same name as the one you're moving.

Brono's suggestion is good, and I too believe by skipping the user, you did pretty much tell it to skip most everything. This is due to the assistant wanting to migrate what it sees as "personal data" into the users home folder, instead of scattered across the drive.

One thing to keep in mind, migration assistant does run as part of the initial OS setup after a clean install (or after unboxing a new Mac). This saves needing to create a temporary user, assuming you choose to go through the process then.

I'm also not sure how the assistant treats data from a Windows machine. This is a new feature with Lion, and I've never had any hands on experience with it. My guess is it's probably pulling from the most common locations the Apple Geniuses found data when doing PC to Mac migrations in the stores.

Okay, I'm just going to to the slower way and pull everything over manually. I was pleased to find that the iTunes library info came over just fine. I just dragged and dropped into the music folder on the Mac and it worked well. I just need to point it to the new location of the video files once I've transferred them.

On an unrelated note: I do think I came across a little bug, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Here's what I did and what I think the sequence of events was:

- I had my mother set up with the user name of "First Last" (for example), and she has a password to log in
- I went in and changed it to "First L" because I was briefly considering using the migration assistant and wanted the new user to have the "First Last" name
- Instead, I changed my mind about the assistant and started transferring over 200GB of files manually
- Because this was taking a long time, I went and ran errands
- When I came back, the computer had gone to screensaver mode and therefore locked my out
- Here's the problem: the login showed the username as "First Last" instead of "First L"

I couldn't log in at all. Perhaps if I knew more about OSX, I would have known of a workaround, but the only option I had was to manually shut the computer down and reboot. When the Mini booted up again I was presented with the login of "First L," as it should have been. That was a little frustrating. Any idea why this happened? I'm not saying I didn't do anything wrong, I'd just like to know what's up...

BTW, how do I remove the login screen from after the screensaver mode?

OS X has two different usernames. One is a "Friendly" full name, as shown in the Users and Groups system preference. The other is the Unix level username. Unix usernames on OS X won't have a space in the name, and tend to be all lower case. The users on disk home folder will use the unix name, instead of the full name. On top of that, there is a user ID (a number, also from the unix side), and a UUID (more used with directory services like Active Directory).

From your description, it sounds like the full name was changed, but not every service on the machine was made aware of the change. This might indeed be a bug you have discovered. The login screens (and switch user off the screensaver lock) will accept the friendly name and try and resolve it to the unix name. They also accept the unix name directly.

To see the unix name, right click the account in Users & Groups and choose advanced options. I highly recommend not touching anything in that screen, as it can break things.


I'm going to answer this more in a "teach a man to fish" manner. Open System Preferences, and type in something to search for in the spotlight dialog in the upper right.

Matt, I believe the bug you found in migration in 10.7 is addressed in the 10.7.1 update. At least according to one of the bullet notes in the high-level changes description.