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I sent my MacBook Pro to Apple enterprise support for 3 days. They repaired it and sent it back, and the data was not affected. Before sending it in, I made a fresh time machine backup to an external drive, AND I used migration assistant to transfer my data to a loaner laptop. I used the loaner for a few days during the repair, accumulating some new data, changing files, working.

Now I need to resume using the repaired computer, and send back the loaner. It sure would be awesome if this use case was supported: Use migration assistant to restore just the files that have changed, from the loaner back to the original machine.

It would be easy enough to just do a complete migration of course, but it seems unnecessarily risky, somehow, when 99% of the original data is sitting on the original machine already.

Advice?

Thanks in advance, Joe

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  • How comfortable are you with Terminal?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 6:59
  • There is a command line tool 'rsync' that would be great for this, but it does require some setup and knowing the local IP address of each machine. Let us know if that sounds like something you would like to try.
    – David Rouse
    Commented Jan 27, 2022 at 13:41

1 Answer 1

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Assuming all the changed files are within your home directory you can use the Find functionality within Finder to identify all files changed since a specific date.

  • Open your home directory in Finder (or your Documents folder if this is where all the changed files are)

  • Type Cmd-F

  • Filter by "Content modified"

    enter image description here

You still need to copy them manually afterwards though.

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