The last time I did that, it took hours to get everything in its place and working properly, so if you can avoid it, do! Even if it means repeating a migration. If all else fails, though, you may be faced with moving your files over by hand instead of migrating them, which is a big old pain, for sure. This’ll mean creating a temporary user account on your new Mac to check for updates before you proceed with Migration Assistant manually (rather than using the Setup Assistant to transfer data immediately after turning on your computer). As Apple notes in a link I posted above, you’ll need to be sure that both Macs are as up to date as they can be. Why was the migration corrupted in the first place? (I suspect that any Mac over five years old hates me, but I can’t prove that.) However, if this problem is happening to you and Apple’s permissions solution doesn’t fix it, I’d suggest trying the above.Īnd finally, now is a good time to point out the best practices for moving data to a new Mac. Now, I’m not sure why just repeating the process solved the issue. For the second attempt, I used a Time Machine backup.

I attempted the migration using a different method the first go-round, I had connected the two Macs together for Migration Assistant.

I wiped the Mac and reinstalled Mojave using macOS Recovery.

So what I did (and what finally fixed the problem) was the following: For one of my migrated computers, this worked beautifully! Onward and upward! For the other, though, this fix didn’t help, and I was faced with a borked Mac and the possibility of an unhappy user. (Say that three times fast.)Īs that article notes, you’ll then use a Terminal command and a reboot to finish the process. If you start having this problem, Apple does have a support article on what to do, which involves using your Home folder’s “Get Info” window to propagate the proper permissions. I can’t remember the last time I had such an “oh holy crap” feeling in my stomach. If you know anything about the underpinnings of macOS, then…well…you know that’s just bad.

When I checked the permissions on one machine, I found that my user’s folders-Desktop, Documents, and so on-were owned by root. Typing in the password (or using Touch ID) to allow the “repair” did no good, and each computer was pretty much useless with constant warning pop-ups.

Get info mac wheel user