iBooks migration to a new OS

As per my previous post, I'm in the process of a very methodical upgrade to El Capitan via a new install and manual migration on a VM.  One of my issues was that I want to keep various installed programs with their respective data complete.  e.g. Mail, iBooks, iTunes etc. iBooks looked like it was going to be a problem, as I want to keep my collections and metadata on the new OS.

After quite a few failed attempts, I have a process that worked for me.

On my destination Mac in the VM
• Hold down the option key and select Go >> Library from the Finder menu.  Move the following items, if they exist, to the Trash

Cookies/com.apple.ibooks.cookies
Preferences/com.apple.ibooks.plist
Containers/com.apple.iBooksX

• Move the following item to the desktop.  Don’t move it to the Trash

 Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService




Then, restart the Mac.


Don’t open iBooks.


After restarting, copy the folders that were deleted/moved in the previous step from the source Mac to the destination Mac.  I mounted my home directory as a shared folder in the VM and then copied the files across with the finder.  This seemed the easiest for me and it did work.


Don’t open iBooks yet.




Now restart the VM Mac.

After this final restart, iBooks can be opened, and it should be the same as the original Mac, down to the window size and position.

There may be steps where you can skip the reboot of the Mac and/or moving of files, but this method is the one that finally worked for me.