I have a borked Macbook Pro running apple silicon, and to recover files from it I’ve shared Macintosh HD in “Shared Disk” mode via startup options and connected it to a working mac with a USB-C cable. I can view and move around the file system of the borked mac in finder – but I can’t copy the contents of my User folder over (I get a -36 error). How can I copy the files from my damaged mac over to the new one?

What I’ve tried so far:

  1. Run dot_clean on the user folder (inside a recovery mode terminal on the old computer). RESULT: dot_clean command not recognized
  2. ssh into the old computer from the new one. RESULT: hangs until it times out or says the connection was refused. Either I have the wrong IP addresses (using ones I found from running ifconfig -a | grep -i inet on the old computer)
  3. Enable remote login on old computer to fix ssh problems using systemsetup -setremotelogin on. RESULT: systemsetup command not found

What’s the best way for me to successfully copy my old files from the broken computer to the new one?

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