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2nd puzzle was to get the dongle software on the iMac to see the mini. Took several minutes after turning the mini on.
The macOS install app showed up, but wanted to talk me thru setup with voice-over because it couldn’t see the Bluetooth mouse. Another trip to the basement for a wired mouse.
Puzzle 3 was plugging in the time machine backup volume to copy everything over.

2/n

Got to the part in setup to point to Time Machine and it told me I needed to run the system update. Was gonna skip that but nah, do it. That took 1/2 hour.
Got the restore started from Time Machine. It’s running now. It’s estimating 51 hours to complete. Yikes!
Oops, just dropped to 33 hours. Ok.
2 minutes later and it says 22 hours.
Time for lunch I guess.

3/n
#macintosh #macOS #macmini

Now it says 4 hours.

4/n
#macintosh #macOS #macmini

There’s about 350gb of stuff on the iMac.
Estimate is waffling around 3 1/2 hours +- 20 minutes. At first it was saying transfer rate was 30-40 mb/sec. Now it’s down to 5-6 mb/sec, so it’s bogging down in system and app pieces I’m guessing, thrashing around in the directory.The progress bar is sitting at around 1/4.

5/n

OMG! It’s finished! Only about 4 hours altogether.
Now I just have to tweak all the defaults.

6/6

Ok, not finished, of course. As expected, some software is unhappy at moving from Intel to Apple innards. Photoshop was not a surprise. That it was easy to resolve was a surprise. Word is another. Have to buy a new license. I need Word for 1 legacy task. There’s an old version of it on the iMac that I can use when necessary. FTW. I used to enjoy doing this. I’m out of practice and it’s more anxiety-provoking than it used to be.
7/n

So I’m a week in and no big surprise of course but using the old iMac as a monitor is less than ideal. It works, but the lack of resolution options is a pain, as is having to keep a keyboard & mouse for the iMac next to the ones for the mini. A weird issue is that sometimes when I wake them up the mini keyboard doesn’t respond and I have to unplug/replug it in. Rebooting the mini doesn’t help. Any recs on a 27”, hi-res, cheap monitor? The Apple Studio is $1600!

@qurlyjoe What do you consider a cheap monitor? I’m moving to a Mac Mini from Windows and it really didn’t like my old HDMI monitor! I work with fine art so needed something colour-accurate. Ended up buying an ASUS ProArt Display 27 Inch 4K which has been really good so far.