Fresh install question for Monterey

Hi all,

I‘m on a mid-2012 13 inch MacBookPro running Catalina, the latest officially supported Mac OS. I‘ve successfully got the Monterey installer on my USB Drive and am able to boot it up on my laptop. However when I attempt to install Monterey, I get the message that my target internal hard drive doesn’t have enough memory for the install. This is a common problem I believe, wherein a hard drive seemingly has plenty of space, but due to ‚other‘ files, purgeable memory, etc., there isn‘t enough memory to install an update.

So I’m thinking about doing a clean install since most people on the interwebs are saying that‘s the best way forward when updating via OpenCore.

My question is this. If I make a Time Machine backup of my computer in it‘s current state, running on Catalina, will I be able to migrate over all the data after doing a clean install on Monterey via the USB installer. I should think this would be the case, since this is how it works when one gets a new computer and wants to migrate data over from their old one. Or will I run into problems since I‘m using OpenCore?

Has anyone else been able to swipe a hard drive, install the newer OS via OpenCore, and then migrate over their data from their last TM backup?

Thanks all for your help!!