Migrating applications and data to a new Mac without using Time Machine

You want to migrate data to a new Mac but are also interested in using a clean install instead of restoring from a backup to remove any of that unnecessary crud that gathers, especially when you someone like me who constantly installs and uninstalls applications and tools.

I have been trialing a handful of tools and processes recently building towards helping with this and now I have a shiny new M1 Pro laptop it seemed a perfect time to see how useful they were.

Here’s what I wanted to test and how the process went.

Brew bundle

Homebrew is amazing, hands down one of the best package managers there is. In addition to the more regular features you are likely familiar with is the brew bundle command that can bundle all the applications you have managed with homebrew core, cask (for GUI applications), mas (for Mac App Store installs), and whalebrew (for Docker images) into one dependency file. I’ve been on something of a mission to move as many of my applications as possible into a form of package manager, as opposed to loosely dragging applications to the Applications folder. This way in theory, I can then run some commands on another computer and everything is restored.

A couple of years ago someone showed me how operating systems like Nix work, and while macOS will always be far from the “everything is configuration” concept, this gets you some of the way.