Losing my mind

You know how you think you have a problem solved and it isn't?  Yah.  Me too and really lately. 

I spent most of Thursday night trying to migrate the old Mac Mini to the new one.  I can follow instructions, but it wouldn't work because I didn't have enough of the right cables.  No matter what I tried, I needed a USB to USB cable.  It was a surprise that I didn't have one.

Rule 1.  No matter how many cables of various combinations of connections you save in a box, the one you need won't be in there.

Rule 2.  Walmart won't have them.

Rule 3.  "Best Buy" will have them at 2x the price. 

I bought a Best Buy cable.

And it was weird.  The cable itself has software.  For  file transfers between Macs, it has a program that opens "GoBetween" and "Easy Site"  It wanted internet acceptance.  I refused.  I couldn't figure out what they wanted annyway.

But I figured out how I could migrate a different way.  I have an external drive that has 4 TB.  So using Migration Manager on Mac I copied the old Mac Mini to the external drive and then "restored" the external driver to the new Mac Mini  (and it promised that it would save all files and even individual program settings),

It didn't.

I can copy files from the old Mac Mini to the new one, but I have to keep both on separate active Mac Minis and monitors to do that.  And guess what?  I'm lacking a cable. 

That's why I'm losing my mind!