Apple has greatly improved the macOS upgrade process over the years. With recent releases, it’s rare for something to go pear-shaped and prevent an upgrade from completing. However, you can sometimes find yourself in an in-between state, as one reader found. Your accounts have migrated with all their data, but with each reboot, macOS loses changes to startup items, system preference settings, and even app registrations. The boot volume passes all the tests with flying colors: safe mode, first aid in Disk Utility, reinstalling the operating system from macOS Recovery, and more.
At this point, you only have two options:
- Use Migration Assistant to essentially “reinstall” your primary user or any affected macOS users.
- Erase the drive and re-migrate omitting network and other settings.
- Erase, reinstall macOS, create a new user, migrate apps, and manually copy your user files.
In any case, you do not modify any of your files and do not delete anything. The problem seems to be in the way macOS tracks what it should look at on startup.
Reinstall your user via Migration Assistant
You typically use Migration Assistant to move a previous startup volume to a new Mac or similar transfer. However, Migration Assistant allows you to install specific users from a backup volume. Warning: The following steps sign you out of your account to perform the migration.
- Create a new Time Machine backup if one hasn’t been created since the last time you made changes to the account’s files. (You can also use a cloning app, like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!)
- Launch Apps > Utilities > Migration Wizard.
- Click on Continue and authenticate. This signs you out of your current account in Migration Assistant mode.
- Select your Time Machine drive or other backup and click Continue.
- Choose the specific backup if there is more than one, then click Continue.
- In the “Select information to transfer” window, check the account or accounts with which you are having problems and click on Continue. (Note: You need at least as much free space on your startup volume as listed next to each account.)
- You are prompted to rename the accounts, as they would otherwise overlap with existing accounts on this Mac.
- Follow the prompts to complete the restore.
- When you’re done, sign in to the “new” version of your broken account.
Try making changes that failed before. If they are working now, you can delete the old account:
- In System Preferences > Users and groupsclick the lock icon and authenticate.
- Select the old user account and click the minus sign at the bottom of the account list.
- Choose “Delete Home Folder” and click Delete user. Confirm deletion. (Since you have a backup of this account and a copy on your drive, you should have enough backups. You can also opt to “Save home folder to a disk image”, but you need a lot of storage space. storage to make this copy. )
If the above did not bring you back to your previous working state, try the following two solutions.
Perform a full reinstall and restore
You can take more drastic action at this point if the above didn’t work:
- After making sure you have two separate copies of your backed up and secured files, restart your Mac in macOS Recovery.
- Select disk utility and click Continue.
- Select your startup disk and erase it, then partition it, as explained in this article.
- Quit Disk Utility, select Reinstall macOSClick on Continueand follow the prompts.
- Reboot into macOS and choose your backed up volume to use with Migration Assistant. Follow the instructions, but do not check System and Network– despite the innocent-sounding name, unchecking it has been the fix for some gnarly migrations I’ve had in the past.
Once completed, does your account retain the changes? If so, stop here and make a fresh save.
If not, there is one more thing to try.
Migrate to a new account manually
Since you reinstalled macOS in the previous step and migrated all your apps from backup, you can avoid both of these operations.
Instead, you’ll create a new account and move your files there. Go to System Preferences > Users and groups and create a new account: click on the + sign, name the account and give it administrative privileges.
Since Apple usually doesn’t allow you to copy directly from one account to another without changing permissions, you can use the Users > share folder as an intermediate step.
First, while logged into your broken user account, copy everything you need to the shared folder. Most of your personal files are probably in Documents and Photos: hold down the Option key and drag them into the Shared folder. Do the same for the other files. (You can hold Command instead of Option to move these folders to Shared if you’re low on storage, and can rely on a backup of your primary user account if you need to fall back on it.)
Next, log out of that broken account and log in to the new one you created:
- Complete setup steps, such as signing in to iCloud and other Apple ID accounts.
- Command-drag files from the shared folder to the location of the new account.
- Launch the apps you need to use and reconnect libraries and re-enter records.
It can be difficult or time-consuming to set up some apps, especially those with elaborate permissions. Check the application developer’s website to find out if the company offers instructions on finding settings files, often deep within ~/Library/ in various subfolders like Application Support and Preferences. Also turn to a search engine to get help from others who have gone through the same restoration.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Michael.
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