Time Machine question

nantucket66 · 10 Oct 2020 at 09:44

I have a 2013 15 inch MBP, the battery in which is becoming a liability. My local apple store replaced the battery in it 18 months ago, which was a big help, but the past few weeks it has started draining really quickly with no almost no programs or apps running. I've got a shiny new 16 inch i9 MBP coming tomorrow.

In terms of restoring content (mac mail and documents largely) is it just a case of plugging my time machine drive into the new machine and restoring or something?

Never had anything go wrong so I've never had to restore or recover before.

Cheers

ChrisD. · 10 Oct 2020 at 09:48

Yup, when you first power it on it will offer you the option to restore from Time Machine. Do it over a cable if you can depending on the size of the backup as it can take a while.

nantucket66 · 10 Oct 2020 at 10:04

Great, thanks for that. I just use a Western Digital passport drive so I presume I just plug it in and away it goes? (I've got a USB C adapter)

ChrisD. · 10 Oct 2020 at 10:17

Yeah, it should find it when you select the Time Machine restore option.

Feek · 10 Oct 2020 at 11:52

My recommendation here would be to use Migration Assistant on the new Mac to suck everything over from the old Mac.

Connect the two via ethernet and it'll be nicely quick. Time Machine will be very slow in comparison.

nantucket66 · 11 Oct 2020 at 18:27

All sorted, new machine is great.

Only issue is Office will not activiate.

Had Office 2016 on old machine (and an iMac), signed out on old machine in excel and logged into new machine, but it says no licence and prompts buy me to buy another.

On iMac and new MBP I'm signed into excel on the same account - activated fine on iMac, but not having it on the new MBP, old MBP was fine with both machines running at the same time.

Any thoughts?

Feek · 12 Oct 2020 at 10:42

nantucket66 said:
All sorted, new machine is great.

Out of interest, how did you do it? Time Machine or Migration Assistant?

I can't help with the activation problem though, sorry.

nantucket66 · 12 Oct 2020 at 15:42

Feek said:
Out of interest, how did you do it? Time Machine or Migration Assistant?

I can't help with the activation problem though, sorry.

I used Time Machine, there wasn't a lot of data to shift over to be honest, just emails, a few pictures and documents, 50GB max, took about 90 minutes.
Not got my head around the Office activation just yet, LibreOffice on the go until I am in the mood to sort it!
If Microsoft insist on a new licence they can do one!