My 2012 mini has been on Catalina since it came out without problems, I use SuperDuper! for cloning my ageing Fusion drive.
Cool! Did you find it running more efficiently than with older MacOS versions?
It's been years since I used both
Carbon Copy Cloner and
SuperDuper (wasn't Carbon Copy Cloner free to begin with, which it isn't any longer?). It seems SuperDuper is free, but if you buy a license it'll give you additional features, and the free version is sufficient for the occasional cloning needs it seems.
What I'm struggling to understand is what do I need to do in order to "test drive" MacOS 10.15 on the Mac Mini without affecting my 10.14 setup. Let me explain.....
I do understand
what FreakinEurekan said earlier about adding a new volume to the Mac Mini's existing drive, and install 10.15 on that volume. This will allow me to hold down the ALT key while booting and select which OS version (10.14 or 10.15) to use. So if I select 10.15 it'll boot into that, which is perfectly fine if I just want to get a feel of 10.15 Catalina without "commiting", but in an environment completely isolated from my existing apps and files.
What I want is to "test drive" 10.15 with my existing files and apps, to see if I can do everything as before (i.e. all my files and apps work fine). So if all that works out I'll just commit to using 10.15.
Failing having such a solution available, the next best thing is probably to create that new 10.15 volume, then copy over (using an external USB drive or USB thumb drive) the files and apps that I question to see if they work there.
Is there a way of doing file-sharing between the 10.14 and 10.15 volumes?
This is of course a lot more cumbersome than accessing my 10.14 login user from 10.15, but maybe the only safe and least complicated way of doing it?
UPDATE: never mind
😵
I must have missed something or confused it with some other situation, because on another Mac of mine (a Mac Pro, also with MacOS 10.14, but I've also got 10.15 on a physically separate hard drive) I was able to boot into MacOS 10.15, and on the desktop I was able to access the other drives in the same computer which included my 10.14 related files and apps. No file-sharing configuration or anything. Just accessing a connected drive. I don't know how I could have missed that!
🙄
That way I was able to access both files/folders and even apps from my 10.14 "Applications" folder. I did have problems running some of them, but I think that may be due to support or license files spread around in the 10.14 drive which I didn't boot from. I suppose the result might have been different if I cloned the 10.14 drive (the OS as well as applications) over to a new volume, upgraded that volume to 10.15, rebooted into 10.15 and ran the app from the 10.15 app folder.
So.... to answer my own question regarding the Mac Mini:
I could probably "test drive" 10.15 by using Disk Utility to create a new volume on the OS/apps drive (I have a separate drive for the user folders), clone the 10.14 volume over to that new empty volume, boot into the new volume, upgrade to 10.15 and reboot into the newly installed 10.15 volume.
I assume, being a cloned volume, that all the user information and linking would function perfectly in the same way as the original 10.14 volume.
So, if the new 10.15 setup works as intended I could use Disk utility to delete the old 10.14 volume and expand the new 10.15 volume to use the rest of the drive space, right? At least in theory I think that's the way to do it. I found some instructions on the matter here:
use more than one version of MacOS on a Mac.
Should I select the APFS format when adding the new volume (for the 10.14 clone, later to be upgraded to 10.15) to the physical drive?
The free version of SuperDuper would probably suffice for the cloning, right?
I don’t recall too much else from the Catalina days except that there were also some security/login bugs at launch so make sure you apply all updates once you’re running it as a daily driver if that’s what you decide to do.
Yes, the usual frustrations when updating to a new OS
😉
By the way, what's the difference between creating and using an "installer" USB flash drive for upgrading to MacOS 10.15 and simply downloading the 10.15 installer app to the MacOS 10.14 "Applications" folder and running it from there?
Regarding Retroactive; since MacOS 10.15 replaces iTunes with separate apps for music, videos and podcasts: does this also mean that its files will be spread all over the place? If I decide to upgrade from MacOS 10.14 to 10.15, do I need to do any special preparations first (such as copying the iTunes app and its files/folders (I assume from somewhere within the ~/Library/ folder) over to a USB flash drive, and copy back to the drive after the 10.15 update is complete).
Or can I just proceed with the 10.15 update (of course after doing a full backup of the current 10.14 setup), run Retroactive and things will then work just as before?
I kept one of my loaded 2019 15” MBP after buying an M5 Pro and I keep Mojave on it (last Intel MBP to support Mojave). The biggest change as you have discovered is no more 32-bit app support. So I have Mojave for 32-bit Apple apps and Win10 in Bootcamp (along with Parallels 18 for WinXP and Win7 virtual machines) to run all my legacy games/apps.
That's a good idea!
Anyhow it should be pretty straightforward. I used the Mojave USB drive with my 2019 from Catalina through Sequoia. Anytime I needed or wanted to run a 32-bit app, I’d just boot from USB and I’d have Mojave available. You can do the same with Catalina in your Mini.
Yes, this is a great way to be able to temporarily use another OS.
I've done it myself; from time to time I've prepared various OS versions on different USB drives so that I can do things or use apps that demand a different OS from my usual one.
This is fine for that sort of thing, but the problem remains that a different OS from your usual one won't access anything other than the users generated along with the OS itself.
Hmm.... is there a way to use file-sharing between say MacOS 10.15 (booted from a separate drive or volume) and all files, folders and apps residing on the 10.14 drive? It's probably a bit different from a normal network as the 10.14 volume isn't "on line" while the 10.15 is, but maybe there's a workaround?
Syncing moved from iTunes to the Finder, so that should still work fine. The syncing interface actually isn't very different; you just have to look in a different place. Scroll down a bit in
this article to see what I mean.
Thanks for the link. It explained a lot.
I'm guessing that with iTunes reinstalled (using Retroactive) I can choose to use either iTunes as before or the Finder itself to sync iOS devices?
For me, the biggest annoyance with Apple splitting Music, Podcasts, and TV into separate apps was that iTunes used human readable filenames for Podcasts and organized them in the iTunes folder, but when Apple split off Podcasts into a separate app, podcast files were moved to a subfolder in the ~/Library folder and their names were changed to long strings of meaningless characters. If you are someone who occasionally likes to work with podcasts as regular sound files outside of the iTunes interface, that's now a major pain.
Ouch! This is indeed a major frustration!
Can this be avoided if I use Retroactive to install iTunes in MacOS 10.15?
Will it "clean up" the names, or has the damage already have been done after upgrading to 10.15?
An estimated guess (or hope) is that after upgrading to 10.15 I don't run any of the new media apps (because the first thing they may do is reorganize/rename the media files previously used by iTunes within 10.14 and earlier), but run Retroactive instead.
By the way, what happens if I've installed iTunes with Retroactive in 10.15, but accidently (or because I'm curious) run any of the new media apps? Will they mess everything up so that iTunes will no longer find its files?
The other big issue with Catalina that was never fixed involves file sharing. If you want to enable file sharing on a Catalina machine, the checkbox in the sharing preference pane doesn't work correctly. You need to enable/disable file sharing using the command line. I forget if that bug affects all versions of Catalina or just the last few.
That's a bad and obvious one which should have been corrected!
🙁
On the other hand, file sharing is probably something you either use all the time or not at all (in my experience), but when you check or uncheck a checkbox it should do what it shows.
What's the command line command for enabling and disabling file sharing?
