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Ease Mac migration with OS X net sharing

Rob Pegoraro
Special for USA TODAY

Q. I'm trying to move my data from my old Mac laptop to my new one, and I'd rather not spend all day watching the data trickle over my home WiFi network.

Apple's MacBook Pro running the Yosemite operating system.

A. When it debuted almost a decade ago in OS X 10.4, Apple's Migration Assistant tool was an awesome, incredibly easy way to move your data, settings and even apps from one Mac to another… if they both had FireWire ports, the only allowed connection method at the time.

Apple has since upgraded Migration Assistant to support wired Ethernet and ThunderBolt connections as well as WiFi networking. But many of those connection options have succumbed to Apple's changing tastes in hardware design: The MacBook Air has never included Ethernet or FireWire ports, and the ThunderBolt ports on the last few models don't have counterparts on older hardware.

If you don't want to buy a USB-to-Ethernet or a ThunderBolt-to-FireWire adapter — both are likely to collect dust afterwards — the obvious option is to borrow your existing home WiFi network.

(ThunderBolt is a fast and versatile successor to FireWire, but it's fared even worse than FireWire in the mass market as an alternative to USB 2 and now USB 3 connections.)

But leaning on your wireless network will also take a painfully long time. In one Mac migration I conducted in December, the new machine's copy of Migration Assistant estimated I'd be waiting almost six hours for a relatively small amount of data, settings and apps to get moved over.

And because the old Mac had not had a recent Time Machine backup made — I know, I know, bad practice — I couldn't employ that backup to bring across at least the old computer's files and settings.

I thought that creating a direct, ad hoc Wi-Fi connection from one Mac to another would speed things up, but the new model consistently failed to see the old one until I tried a wrinkle on this strategy that I first found in a well-illustrated blog post by an IT specialist named Marcus Hesse.

That involves enabling Internet Sharing on the old Mac — without having it connected to the Internet. Open "System Preferences" on that machine, click the "Sharing" icon, click the checkbox next to "Internet Sharing" and set it to share the connection from Ethernet or FireWire (as in, a port that's not plugged into anything) and to Wi-Fi.

Give the new network an obvious name and password, then connect to that temporary Wi-Fi network on the new Mac. Launch Migration Assistant on the old and then new Mac, and things should proceed according to Apple's advice (which leaves out the reference to this Internet sharing workaround you can read at the end of an older version of that tech-support document).

In the case of December's Mac migration, this yielded a much faster estimate of the transfer time that proved to be true: less than an hour. The only trick after the transfer was turning off Internet sharing on the new Mac, as that setting had been migrated over along with everything else to the old Mac.

Tip: Use iCloud to close open browser tabs remotely

The last two versions of OS X and iOS include a helpful feature in their iCloud browser synchronization that you can easily overlook. As in, it took me several months to discover it myself.

This syncs your bookmarks in Apple's Safari browser in every device signed into your iCloud account and lets you see what pages are open in each copy of that browser — then lets you close them remotely.

First click or tap the "Show All Tabs" icon that looks like two overlapping rectangles, then scroll all the way down. You'll see the names of each page open in other copies of Safari. To close one in OS X, mouse over it and click the small "x" in a circle you'll see to its right; in iOS, swipe left across that page title and tap the red "Delete" button.

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.

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