Clone your Mac

This is paramount. If you want to make a perfect copy of your old Mac on your brand new one, the best option is to clone it. That means copying some or all of your existing Mac to a fast external disk or SSD and then copying the clone to the new computer.

There are three key apps that can help you to do that: Apple’s own Time Machine and the third-party apps SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. Each of these apps can copy your entire system) and Carbon Copy Cloner () are paid apps, they both have trial versions you can use to do a simple clone; as they’re both very good backup apps too, it’s likely that you’ll want to buy them to keep using them or access their more advanced features.