This also includes the preferences for other Apple software products like Final Cut Pro and GarageBand.
These are the preferences that relate solely to macOS system programs, like the Dock and Finder. These files shouldn’t hurt anything, but the do clutter up your system unnecessarily.Ĭopy everything that starts with com.apple. You’re guaranteed not to miss anything, but you’ll probably grab a lot of stuff that you don’t need, like PLISTs for applications you’re not transferring to the new user account. There are two paths we can take here:Ĭopy over every file. These are the actual files that contain your preferences.Ĥ. We need to copy these PLIST files to our transfer media. Inside this folder, you’ll find a ton of Property Lists or PLISTs. We’re using the tilde here to represent the home directory ( /Users/alexander in this example).ģ. Type in ~/Library/Preferences to navigate to the correct folder. Click Go to folder… in Finder’s Go menu.Ģ. The canonical location is ~/Library/Preferences, and that’s the directory most macOS system applications use.ġ. Under macOS, user preferences can be stored in a couple of places. We will deal with your Library folder next. You can copy the files by dragging and dropping, just as you would with a normal directory. Copy everything in the user’s home folder except the Library folder to your transfer media. Create a user folder on your transfer media ( /Users/alexander in this example).Ģ. Most users store their files in their home directory, so copying it to your new Mac is a no-brainer first step.ġ. This will make it easier to place the files in the same location when we transfer them to our new user account, and avoid misplacing (and losing) preference files.įor example, if you have a file from /Users/alexander/Library/Preferences, you could put that in a folder with the exact same file path. Make sure your drive is formatted as HFS+ and large enough to contain all the files you plan to copy over.Īs we copy files, we should try to recreate the file path for those files. You could even use network storage, but transferring 20 GB over Wi-Fi isn’t much fun. The easiest way to handle this process is over a USB flash drive, but an external hard drive will work just as well. We’ll need an external storage medium to transfer user preferences and data to our new Mac.
That will be the same as your account name.īefore your transfer user preferences, make sure that the account name for your new account is exactly the same as your existing account. If you’re not sure what your short name, look at the name of your home folder. Some macOS options and third-party applications reference your short name, and if it’s not the same, those references will be ineffective or buggy. The most important thing here is the account name, or “short name,” of your account. Setting Up Your New Macīecause you’ll be copying over the exact settings from your old Mac, you need to make sure your new Mac’s user is configured in the same way as your old user. You might use these procedure to “clone” an existing user to a new account on the same physical Mac, or you could transfer the user preferences to a brand new Mac install. User preferences, if your curious, include all the different options you’ve used to configure your system, like Dock preferences, keyboard shortcuts, desktop backgrounds and more. But if you want to transfer user preferences and data to a new macOS install, this should get you there. You just have to know which files you need and where to find them. If you want to copy over absolutely everything, this probably isn’t the method for you – Migration Assistant will work a little better.
You just need to know which files to move. But if you’d prefer to clean house with a new machine and just transfer user preferences to your new Mac, you can. Time Machine and Migration Assistant can be useful if you want to copy your entire setup from one computer to another.
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