When you buy a new iPhone, it takes a few minutes to get everything ready. All you have to do is back up your old phone and log into your iCloud account on your new phone, and you can pick up where you left off, lay out the Home screen, open the Safari tabs and all of this. .
On Mac, it’s not that simple. While Apple offers several ways to transfer files from one machine to another, none are as easy as iCloud backups on iOS. But if you know which buttons to edit, which apps to sync, and which folders to share, it doesn’t have to be that hard. Just follow our guide to setting everything up on your new Mac.
Apple services, passwords and apps
First the simplest. If you subscribe to an Apple service, all you need to do is sign into your iCloud account for the appropriate service – Music, TV, Arcade, News, etc. – to put you back in synchronization. Your library of music and movies, your favorite shows, games, channels and magazines will be synced and ready to go.
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The same goes for the other Apple apps you use: Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Safari, Photos, and Notes, as well as any passwords stored on your keychain. And since Safari is basically a password manager now, you’ll be able to see all of your passwords saved on your old computer, no matter how many years since you last logged in. Just go to the Apple Account tab in System Preferences (or iCloud on pre-Catalina MacOS) and make sure whatever you want to sync is checked.
ICloud reader
There might not be any official way to save everything in Apple’s online locker, but you can still use your iCloud account to transfer important files between machines. In the same preferences for the Apple / iCloud account above, you will see a checkbox for Desktop and Document folders, which will sync your file across all your devices.
However, you will need some space. Apple only gives you 5GB of free space per account, so you might need more if you want to store a lot of files. Apple offers monthly storage plans of 50GB for $ 1, 200GB for $ 3, and 2TB for $ 10.
When you sign in to your new Mac, you should see an iCloud tab in the sidebar of the Finder window, but if it isn’t, you can add it in Finder preferences. Once they appear, simply drag the relevant files to your desktop and upload the documents you want to store locally by clicking on the cloud icon.
You can also use your iCloud drive to transfer files that are not in your documents folder just by dragging them. For example, if you want to save all of your downloads, you just need to drag the folder from your old Mac to your iCloud drive and drag it to your new Mac.
Migration assistant
For the rest of your data – apps, media, projects, downloads, etc. – you can use Apple’s integrated migration assistant. While setting up on your MacBook M1, you will be presented with an option to transfer your data from Mac.
To start the process, you need to open the migration assistant on your old Mac, which is in the Utilities folder in Applications, and connect the two machines via Wi-Fi or via a USB-C cable (which will be much more fast) .
Then just select what you want to transfer to your new Mac (Applications, Users, Other Files, and System / Network Preferences) and click Continue. You may need to let it run for a while, especially if you’re transferring over Wi-Fi, but once it’s done, all of your files will be on both machines.
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