Tips for upgrading to Catalina or Big Sur

[BobShaw]

Having just (today) upgraded successfully to Catalina after many attempts, I suggest that anyone upgrading do the following.
(Ideally this is done while you are still at Mojave, as it becomes a lot more difficult afterwards.)
Backup to TimeMachine at each step.
Go Apple Menu / About This Mac / System Report and go through Applications, Extensions and Frameworks and delete anything more than 5 years old unless you know you need it or it is from Apple (maybe). 32 bit apps won't work. RetroActive can make Aperture, etc work after upgrading.

Go to Library/Printers and delete them all and reinstall the printers that you have with the latest software.
Go to Library/Extensions and delete anything more than 5 years old unless you know you need it or it is from Apple (maybe)
Do the same for System/Library/Extensions unless you know you need it or it is from Apple (maybe).

The biggest problem is crap left over from generations of use.

If you can't delete them then this works:
Restart with CMD-R
Go to Utilities/Terminal.
cd '/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Library/Extensions' (return)
ls or ls -l (list)
rm -rf badextension.kext
Up arrow and repeat as required.
Quit and Restart.

Hope that helps. B

[eddiehop]

and....every now and then you have to do a clean install:

Copy everything on your drive onto another drive.

Erase the main drive, install a fresh OS and have nothing pulled over from time machine backups.

Then...painstakingly and carefully...install just the stuff you want: doing fresh installs from Adobe or whatever and copying necessary small pieces from your copy of what you had before.

I recently did this with my new iMac. I am still going back to that drive and fetching things I forgot to install. (But all of that debris from 12 years of photoshop/lightroom installations is gone.)



"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

[Chris Kern]

Go Apple Menu / About This Mac / System Report and go through Applications, Extensions and Frameworks and delete anything more than 5 years old unless you know you need it or it is from Apple (maybe). 32 bit apps won't work.

I found this free software utility to be useful before I finally upgraded my primary desktop computer to MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) a couple of weeks ago.  It recurses through the filesystem's directory hierarchy, and identifies any applications that are not 64-bit clean.

[BobShaw]

and....every now and then you have to do a clean install:

Copy everything on your drive onto another drive.

Erase the main drive, install a fresh OS and have nothing pulled over from time machine backups.

Then...painstakingly and carefully...install just the stuff you want:

That is the more drastic approach. The downside is that you lose all of your users, applications, settings, licenses and possibly documents.
It is like demolishing the house versus taking out the garbage.
It is usually far easier to delete than put back.
Other than Restore from Backup, which takes about 4 hours, the worst I have ever had to do was to get a fresh copy of the operating system using CMD-R, which takes about two hours.