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I have been using a Time Machine for back ups for about 2 years now. Recently, I got a new iMac 27in and ‘restored’ it from my MacBook Air backup (most updated OS). I chose all the options as seen below: Setup options

I have noticed that my new iMac is running a bit sluggish, I am attributing this to the fact that it a Fusion Drive, but I am also being told that it could be because I copied over all the files (including Computer & Network Settings)

Is it advisable to restore a Mac from a different Macs Time Machine?

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    How recently is recently? Don't forget macOS can spend literally days indexing, performing photo library curation and other background tasks which will slow everything down. Give everything at least a week, perhaps two if you had a lot of data to transfer. – grg♦ Jul 29 at 18:03
  • I mean the restoration from Time Machine took like 2.5 hours (which is fine, I don’t care about that). But I have been using the computer for about a week now normal use (since the restoration). – Matt Bart Jul 29 at 18:17
  • After getting used to an SSD, any spinny rust drive is going to feel very slow. – Tetsujin Jul 30 at 6:09
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Actually that is, in most cases just fine.

I've been restoring my user profile on an older Mac to a newer Mac since the Migration Assistant was available on OSX. And I always do what you just did, restore everything.

That said, if you were having issues with your networking on the old Mac then it might carry over to the new Mac. But I have never seen restoring the network settings to a new Mac cause the new Mac to misbehave in any way.

That said, just because I didn't have any problems doesn't mean it can't happen. You could go through your ~/library/Preferences and /Library/Preferences folders, delete any networking related files and reboot. That would likely tell you if that was the problem.

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  • Cool! I haven’t been having any issues specific to networking, but this is good to know! Just more a sluggish computer and thought it may be attributed to this. – Matt Bart Jul 29 at 18:38
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The Fusion Drive is significantly slower than the SSD on a MacBook Air. There is a portion of SSD on the Fusion Drive, but after copying all of your files over from your old Mac, it will take the operating system quite a while to determine which are the files/programs you use the most in order to "optimize" (i.e. put on the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive).

After you've been using the computer regularly for a week or two, it should speed up a little (assuming you are consistently using the same software). But it will never be as fast as a pure SSD like on your MacBook Air.

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  • In my case I ended up just opening this one up and throwing in an SSD, but this should be good news to others. Cheers – Matt Bart Jul 31 at 1:23
  • Great idea, Matt. Cheers. – McHobbes Jul 31 at 16:45

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