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data.img preventing Migration Assistant transfers #1511

@DarthNerdus

Description

@DarthNerdus

Describe the bug

The data.img sparse bundle size (8.8TB reported on my Mac) prevented me from using Migration Assistant, which does not provide helpful errors. Understanding the context with #29, I am opening this ticket anyways. I appreciate the forward-thinking adoption of this image format, but clearly even Apple's backup and recovery tools are not yet ready to adopt this.

It was only after failing multiple times to migrate, even thinking of recursive disk space traps, that I identified data.img as the culprit. During use of Carbon Copy Cloner, which reported that it "Discovered" 9.2TB of files but then successfully saved ~400GB that I was able to use CCC's audit function to identify that it registered data.img as being 8.8TB in size.

Apple's migration tool provides notoriously little feedback, and I am opening (yet another) Radar about this. But OrbStack is claiming the juice is worth the squeeze to move forward with Apple's modern tools... when Apple's tools clearly aren't expecting this yet either.

To Reproduce

  1. Use OrbStack as you normally would.
  2. Attempt to migrate to a new Mac using Migration Assistant
  3. Observe that Migration Assistant will calculate a total space requirement that fits on the new Mac
  4. During file migration, the process will stop stating there is "not enough space" every time
  5. Delete data.img from the source drive
  6. Reattempt migration
  7. Migration succeeds.

Expected behavior

I would be able to migrate from my old Mac, to my new (which has larger storage, not less), without finding and deleting data.img.

Diagnostic report (REQUIRED)

OrbStack info:
Version: 1.7.5
Commit: 82ec89be256fec62e3236f71eea94263bfcffe17 (v1.7.5)

System info:
macOS: 15.0.1 (24A348)
CPU: arm64, 11 cores
CPU model: Apple M3 Pro
Model: Mac15,6
Memory: 36 GiB

Full report: https://orbstack.dev/_admin/diag/orbstack-diagreport_2024-10-13T22-55-23.815864Z.zip

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