118 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2021
HELPDESK MAC 911Once you’ve reduced occupied space
below the level needed to transfer to a
new Mac—making sure to empty the
Trash—you can perform your migration.
You can use Migration Assistant to transfer
between the two machines either while
both are booted into macOS, or when
you’re starting up the new machine fresh,
or after having erased the drive and
installed macOS from scratch.
If you want to use Time Machine for the
migration, be sure after deleting files to
select the Time Machine menu in the
system menubar and choose Back Up
Now. This doesn’t delete the files you’ve
removed from your Mac from the Time
Machine backup immediately (fave.
co/3k3n6pk). That will happen in time. But it
does immediately create a new snapshot
with just the current, reduced set of files
that you can use to migrate to a new Mac.
HOW TO MAKE MACOS APPS
AVAILABLE TO A SINGLE USER
INSTEAD OF ALL USERS
During the pandemic, many people have
found themselves sharing their Macs with
family members and roommates. In that
situation, you may not want every app that
you install to be available to everyone who
uses the same Mac. There’s a folder within
your account that holds apps only you can
run: Instead of the main /Applications
folder at the top level of your startup
volume, it’s ~/Applications (technically,
/Users/short-account-name/
Applications).
Some apps offer a way to control how
broadly they are installed, providing
options during installation that read
something like “install for all users of this
computer” and “install for this user only”
(the language may vary by installer).
When installing an app from a disk
image or one that’s downloaded as a
compressed file, you can copy it right to
your personal apps folder. Choose Go →
Go to Folder in the Finder and paste ~/
Applications into it, and then click Go
( 1 ). Now just drag the app into that folder.
However, if you’re installing through
another method that places apps by
default into the main Applications folder,
including Mac App Store downloads,
follow these steps.
1.Open /Applications, either via Go
to Folder or by opening the main level of
your drive in the Finder and double-
clicking the Applications folder.
2.Open a separate window with your
app folder via the method noted above or
navigating in the Finder through Users →
full account name → Applications.
3.Hold down the Command key and
drag the app from the main Applications
folder into your personal one. (You must
hold down Command or macOS will create
an alias instead of moving the app.)