Restore Solution?

hey MPU,

I am not sure what the best practice is for this situation. Any help would be great.

I sent my MBP for repair, it came back today. I reformatted everything (it rolled back to Yosemite). Not a big deal, I have a Time Machine backup of my MBP before sending it for repair. But I haven’t restored it yet with that option.

On to my wife’s MBP…we have the same exact model but she has Catalina (purchased together), one of the kids spilled water on it a few days ago, tried cleaning as quickly as we could, etc. After a few days noticing that the speakers are crackling and don’t work all the time.

I want to migrate the data from my wife’s MBP (and settings) to my MBP. (I am happy with my Mac Mini).

Do I…

  1. Restore the MBP with her last time Time Machine Backup?
  2. Wipe the MBP completely and restore with her last time TMBp?
  3. Restore the MBP to my last TM settings, and then add her account, and then use migration assistant?

I feel like I am overthinking all of this.

That’s unfortunate. If I understand right, the end goal is that your MBP is running your wife’s files and settings on Catalina. If so, I would clone her drive and restore to yours with Carbon Copy Cloner. I think that’s going to be easier than getting Catalina installed (creating install media, etc.) Here’s what that process would look like.

If she wants to run her files on Yosemite, setting up your MBP with her Time Machine should be okay.

The good news is that you can’t really go wrong experimenting. You can always re-wipe yours and try another migration method.

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You can boot her laptop into Target Disk Mode, then migrate data from it as if it is an external drive to your laptop (with the proper cable).

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The two methods I would use are (in order of preference)

  1. Make a clone of her drive onto a usb drive. Boot that drive on your MBP and clone the drive onto it. Gets your machine looking exactly like hers.
  2. Upgrade your MBP to Catalina and migrate your wife’s time machine backup to the new OS.

While Time Machine is a good backup, it shouldn’t be your only one. Carbon Copy Cloner (my preference) or SuperDuper clones are better for fast recovery. I always make on before any major software or hardware upgrades.

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