The most important thing here is the account name, or “short name,” of your account. Setting Up Your New Macīecause you’ll be copying over the exact settings from your old Mac, you need to make sure your new Mac’s user is configured in the same way as your old user. You might use these procedure to “clone” an existing user to a new account on the same physical Mac, or you could transfer the user preferences to a brand new Mac install. User preferences, if your curious, include all the different options you’ve used to configure your system, like Dock preferences, keyboard shortcuts, desktop backgrounds and more. But if you want to transfer user preferences and data to a new macOS install, this should get you there. You just have to know which files you need and where to find them. If you want to copy over absolutely everything, this probably isn’t the method for you – Migration Assistant will work a little better.
You just need to know which files to move. But if you’d prefer to clean house with a new machine and just transfer user preferences to your new Mac, you can. Time Machine and Migration Assistant can be useful if you want to copy your entire setup from one computer to another.
