MacBook Pro not noticing all files after cancelling and retrying Migration Assistant I bought a new MacBook Pro and tried to transfer all of my files from a 5-year-old MacBook Pro using the Migration Assistant. Both of them are running OS X 10.9.3 (Mavericks).

It seemed to be working fine but it told me that I had to wait 20 hours and I didn't want to wait that long. It said that plugging in an ethernet cable would speed up the transfer. I tried that (via a Thunderbolt adapter on the new Mac) and it didn't seem to do anything. I then cancelled the migration by pressing command + Q.

I am trying it again and it doesn't seem to notice all of my files. On the new Mac, it says I only have 157 KB of data on the old one, even though I have a lot more than that. I tried transferring it anyway and it just restarted right away while the old one said it was trying to reconnect with the new one. I don't see any of my files on the new one.

I tried booting with Command + R and reinstalling the OS on the new Mac but that didn't seem to do anything.

Here is what I see on the new Mac:


What can I do to properly transfer my files?
I recently experienced this issue as well. I hypothesize that the backup is being staged in a cached folder while it completes at which time it'll write the dirs into the proper file structure. To reclaim the diskspace, simply quit migration assistant. Login as a user and restart your Mac. By doing this it cleared out the cached migration and i could start again.