Item — HN Reader

Something's amiss here. You can use TimeMachine to transfer data from an old computer to a new one. I've done this a few times, and clearly the new one doesn't have any piece of hardware in common with the old one.

The last time I did this it was to migrate from a 2015 to 2018 (don't ask - I would have kept the 2015 if it wasn't for my need for 32 GB).

If you use the migration assistant, you should be able to pull a TM backup that was done on computer A into computer B.

There is something else going on in your setup.

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I was surprised too! I could find nothing about this online that actually helped in any way

Migration during install, migration after install, migration from Recovery system - none of them found anything, and they would hang forever looking for data

Was your original backup encrypted?

Did you log into your iCloud account before restoring? (I don't remember if that's a step that happens prior to restoring in the new Mac setup flow)

There could be some credential that needs to be provided in order to find/decrypt a TM Backup. If that key was not available, perhaps the OS/UI doesn't even show you the backup as a restore candidate.