Actually, I don't have access to my older MBP. It is a late 2011 model with the graphics chip problem, and it won't boot anymore, or rarely boot should I say. But I was able to clone its disk before it became inoperable, and I can connect this disk to my new MBP, so your solutions should still work. And I also have the Time Machine backup. So, I'll give it a try.

My old MacBook Pro (early 2011) had the graphics chip problem–and even with it not showing the login screen, I could still access it using SFTP, and presumably SSH as well. (Apple then fixed it for free!) But it's good that you cloned the disk (which should still work anyway, since it's the graphics card that broke). Good luck!

Apple replaced my logic board twice. The last time was in July 2016, but the problem reappeared last month. Now, they consider 2011 MBP's as "vintage", and they don't make the parts anymore so it cannot be fixed. Actually they want us to believe those machines are vintage. To me, a Commodore 64 or an Apple II is vintage. Outside from that, my 2011 MBP was still doing a fine job. Apple did not impress me with that one.

In fact, I don't really need to use SSH. I just rebooted my new MBP in single user mode (Command-S while turning one the MBP), and I logged in as a different user. I then remounted my internal drive to be read-write, mounted my external drive, renamed Library folder of the user I want to recover and I issued the rsync command.

I did not really have to login as a different user, now that I think about it, since the Library folder is most probably not used when logging in single user mode which gives you only a terminal window. I hope the rsync options will keep the original file attributes and not make my current user the owner of the files.

Thanks, I should have mentioned that in the post. And yes, that's what rsync's -p option does. I use the same command to back up an external drive to another one.

Thanks for your solution! It put me on the right track. Since I logged in in Single User Mode to issue the rsync command, all my files were owned by root. I would have had to add the 'o' flag to the rsync command in order to avoid this: rsync -rlptgoDEHP --stats /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/<my user>/Library /Users/<my user>

Also, one should not specify Library in the destination otherwise the result is a Library folder inside the Library folder. In order to fix the ownership problem, I used chown to make my user the owner of the Library folder and its content. I hope no file in there needs to be owned by another user...

One last thing, rsync is verbose by default, and it outputs information about each file it copies. I believe this slows the process, so I also used the -q flag to make the rsync silent. The drawback is that I had no feedback about what was happening, but I just let it run the whole day, and when I came back from work, the copy was done.

Oh, yes. I'm still not sure exactly when folder copies will result in overwriting the original folder, vs. putting it inside the original folder. In my answer I sidestepped the issue by trashing the original folder before the move. And I didn't even think about -o and single-user mode.

Also, on verbosity – it was being verbose because of the -P option. It's the same as --partial --progress, so you can just use --partial instead.

Oh, and as far as I know, everything in your personal Library folder should be owned by you, so your chown should be OK.

It's the first time I use the chat functionality... Thanks for all your help!

After putting the files at the right place (getting rid of a Library folder level that is) and setting the proper owner on the whole folder, I rebooted my MBP, logged in, and everything was back to "normal".

I just had to say yes, inherit the Time Machine backup from the previous machine, and re-enter my IMAP server credentials in Mail.

Fantastic. (:

I did this (between the same OS version) when I upgraded my MBP—Time Machine didn't transfer my screen savers, which I don't have saved anywhere outside of my Library folder, and a few other things. (I can't remember what exactly was missing, but I think it included iMessage chat logs, which I expected to be stored in iCloud but weren't.)