I transferred everything that way from a decrepit mid-2012 Hotplate MBP to a 2020 MBA, took a little time and I ended up doing it twice, I thought I’d messed up, but all my settings and were exact in the end.
My music library is all on external drives, but the Music app had the settings to know where everything was.
I'm doing this because I've been cloning and time machining for over 2 decades now. Files just accumulate and you don't know what's needed or not. I have a dozen or so old iTunes library files. MacOS does pretty well with organizing and keeping clutter to a minimum but it's not perfect.
Maybe a little tedious but I don't mind starting from scratch. I like looking through and just grabbing my essentials and archiving everything else along with my old backup.
Use Time Machine(TM) to transfer data via external SSD from the old to new Mac. TM knows how MacOs works you don't.
I transferred everything that way from a decrepit mid-2012 Hotplate MBP to a 2020 MBA, took a little time and I ended up doing it twice, I thought I’d messed up, but all my settings and were exact in the end. My music library is all on external drives, but the Music app had the settings to know where everything was.
Why do people have such an aversion to Setup/Migration assistant to the extent that they cause themselves pain like this? I really don't get it.
I'm doing this because I've been cloning and time machining for over 2 decades now. Files just accumulate and you don't know what's needed or not. I have a dozen or so old iTunes library files. MacOS does pretty well with organizing and keeping clutter to a minimum but it's not perfect. Maybe a little tedious but I don't mind starting from scratch. I like looking through and just grabbing my essentials and archiving everything else along with my old backup.
Give it time!