NO! Absolutely NOT!

[CrashX]

I'm just a casual user - and I'm VERY LUCKY to have my computer back in operational condition.

Yeah, I have my fun - the whole tongue-in-cheek "Apple sucks since Steve Jobs died" bit.

But, until now, I was kidding. Not anymore - not after High Sierra. I have no clue WHAT they're smokin' - but trust me, kids, you do NOT want any. Seriously bad stuff.

I have NO CLUE what's wrong with High Sierra. I'm not a techie. And so the techies can probably explain what I did wrong. But, in this case, it seems there are quite a few that would agree that what I did wrong was to TRUST Apple and install the piece of garbage in the first place.

No, it didn't completely tank my late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. It just slowed everything way down and glitched and sputtered - it was just a terrible user experience.

So HEY - NO PROBLEM! - I can just downgrade. Certainly that should work, yeah? My own stupidity for installing Apple's new public betas that are now released as "Golden Masters" or whatnot - right? I'm an IDIOT - all on me.

Yep, yep. My bad. Okay, then let's DOWNGRADE - in my case, back to El Capitan, because I had no need for Siri on my laptop. Sorry, it was called Sierra. My bad again. Anyway, BACK to El Capitan for me.

I'm not a COMPLETE IDIOT? Oh, I SO am. I performed a TIME MACHINE BACKUP right before installing High Sierra. So, I'll just restore from that pristine copy - no worries. Apple's got my back - I followed their instructions. I'm not a COMPLETE MORON?

Yep, turns out I am. Apple only allows ONE Time Machine Backup, and my trusty Mac didn't burp out any warnings or relate any failures. Nope - it just...

FAILED. COMPLETELY. Little red exclamation points next to all my directories. So I looked that up - apparently, we TRUST Time Machine to save us, but... NO no no no no... Tons of advice on how to implement Time Machine - zip on what to do when it fails. It's just good practice I suppose to waste my time doing Time Machine backups?

GRAAAHHHHRRRRRR!!!!!!!!! Oh, I HATE Apple at this point... and especially Bean Counter Tim and Poor Fumbling Craig Fedher-Star Trek Alien. Before - I felt sorry for THEM - what with them having to live up to the standard Steve set, and failing so horribly miserably - but now...

Okay - not stepping into a full on rant.

Luckily for me, I'd questioned Apple enough to use Carbon Copy Cloner - which is the ONLY REASON I was able to restore my Mac.

I just can't BELIEVE how HORRIBLE an experience I just went through -

And, of course, no one SHOULD care about my idiotic problems with my Mac.

But - if you were planning on MAYBE installing High Sierra over the weekend - because hey, it's the weekend - I'm not in the position to advise anyone, but... DO NOT DO IT.

And, if anyone cares to read this and might explain to me why I should EVER even use Time Machine EVER again - please enlighten me? When I needed it to WORK - it FAILED on me.

So no - I won't be trusting Tim and Craig to unleash APFS (Apple's Piece of F** S**) file system on my Mac where I actually NEED to access my files. Same goes for their new Video and Photo formats. Nope - don't trust those... Apple Geniuses.

That is my story. If you choose to venture forth into High Sierra - I wish you better luck.

I'm done trusting Apple for now - as far as I'm concerned, they're just forever out of a Jobs.

 

[EugW]

1. You always need more than 1 backup, including at least one bootable backup.

2. I have High Sierra running fine on all three Macs that can take it. I also have it running fine on two more Macs that don’t even officially support it.

 

[PieTunes]

If you were planning on maybe installing High Sierra over the weekend, because hey, it's the weekend, I'm not in the position to advise anyone either, JUST DO IT. But seriously, sorry about your issues. If it's any consolation, I have it installed at four Macs and they are all running great!

 

[CrashX]

I'm happy to hear others have fared better.

Again, I'm just a regular Apple guy - I normally check this and other sites, to make sure idiots like me haven't had any issues.

This time, I guinea-pig'd myself - I was just so super excitabled about the ALL NEW EMOJIS

Seriously, I thought I had some down-time - and Sierra to High Sierra sounded pleasantly reminiscent of Leopard to Snow Leopard.

But rather than reliving an incredibly pleasant OS X 7 upgrade experience, I got OS X 13.

Update: Darn, more bad luck - the immaculate Snowy was 6, not 7. But 10.6.8 is awful close?

 

[Merode]

I have to say, for me High Sierra has been so far pretty bad. I was thinking about waiting till 10.13.3 for all the bugs to be ironed out (you know, new filesystem) but I just wanted to try.

I have of course made TM backup before install. I had 1TB worth of backups all the way to January. Anyway, the install failed the first time. It was actually first time ever in my whole history of Macs (going back to OS X 10.9). It just booted to black screen and did nothing. All drives disappeared from boot up options. I have booted into recovery partition, recovered my TM backup and then proceeded to ugrade to High Sierra again, this time without issues.

I have Late 2013 rMBP with 8GB RAM. High Sierra boots up slower and switching users takes about 3-4 more seconds than on Sierra (during which it looks like it hung up). On my first restart MacBook displayed beige screen with some weird black shapes (corrupted framebuffer?).

The weirdest part is, I have external USB drive with two encrypted .dmgs on it. I didn't change filesystem on it, it's regular HFS+. Lets call these dmgs A and B. I can mount A no problem, however when I mount B, it displays with A's name in Finder. All files are where they should be but I can't open them - Finder displays error about being unable to find path. I have found workaround - if I first mount A and then B (simultaneously), B displays its proper volume name because A is probably taken and everything works just fine.

High Sierra has also broken MacFamily Tree 7 for me which is not supported anymore (there's version 8) but developer said to be working on a fix (wow, surprise).

All in all I'd say High Sierra is rough compared to earlier releases.
10.9 Mavericks - 7/10 (minor bugs and glitches)
10.10 Yosemite - 4/10 (a ton of bugs even in later updates)
10.11 El Capitan - 8/10 (great release, a lot of improvements)
10.12 Sierra - 10/10 (the most stable macOS so far for me, since first release)
10.13 High Sierra 3/10 (back to the pit)

 

[CrashX]

I have to say, for me High Sierra has been so far pretty bad. I was thinking about waiting till 10.13.3 for all the bugs to be ironed out (you know, new filesystem) but I just wanted to try.

I have of course made TM backup before install. I had 1TB worth of backups all the way to January.

I have Late 2013 rMBP with 8GB RAM. High Sierra boots up slower and switching users takes about 3-4 more seconds than on Sierra (during which it looks like it hung up).

Glad you didn't lose all your TM backups. After I restored from my Carbon Copy clone, I had to go into TM and manually select which files/directories to recover that post-dated the clone. So, Time Machine - if it works, YEEHAW - if not... uhm... yeah... best of luck with that?

And during my short time with High Sierra, it just completely hung EVERY time I logged out of my primary and into the guest account. And I had the same laggy experience logging out of my primary.

Also, for anyone excited about the new codecs - you need a "chip" for that? Otherwise, I've read it takes a few seconds to even open the new version of the "high efficiency" photos. I'd have found out myself, but that's not even been released yet.

Is this something new? Apple just releases a "roll out" OS - cool new features coming soon?

Sorry, we've been busy notching an over-sized, over-priced phone that scans your face. It's really useful for people without fingers who tend to stare at themselves vacantly (because they are) in a phone before using it in every facet of their lives. Yes, the NEW faces of Apple - just wait and see!

Uhm... yeah, falling back into a bad mood again.

 

[torchy]

Just a thought about a pattern emerging. I did the upgrade painlessly on three different Macs—a 21.5" 2017 Retina iMac, a 2016 13" Retina MacBook Pro and a 2015 13" Retina MacBook Pro. Not a single issue.

Then tried to upgrade my late 2013 non-retina 27" iMac. Seemed to install and restart okay, but had some very odd things going on (no strat-up items shown under User Login, but they started all the same, missing USB connections, other oddities)I decided to re-start but just black-screened. Wouldn't start at all after that. Thankfully I have nightly clones to an external USB drive thanks to SuperDuper and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing managed to restore from that by disconnecting every other non-essential USB device. After several hours of cloning back the other way I had my system working exactly as it had been before the upgrade.

Now at this point a sensible person would have left well alone, but having established that I was able to restore from back-up I decided to give the update another go. This time minus ANY USB connections that weren't vital, so no external disk drives, no microphone, USB hub, etc. And it worked flawlessly, just as the other three had. Once upgraded, I've plugged all the external devices in and they are all working as expected.

Now I am old in the tooth and a long time Mac user. But I've got lazy over the years. It was always received wisdom to disconnect external connections before an OS upgrade. But over the years as releases seemingly became more stable I'd stopped doing this. So not conclusive but:

1. My 3 successful first time upgrades had no external connections.
2. My failed one had a lot.
3. Once my failed one had none it was perfect.
4. I can't tell for sure, but sounds like the failures reported here all had external disks/other USB devices connected during upgrade?

Lesson learned for me going forward. No, I shouldn't need to, but for the sake of yanking a few cables I will only now update a 'bare machine'.

Interested to see if this is a common point across the failed upgrades.

David

 

[neliason]

1. You always need more than 1 backup, including at least one bootable backup.

I agree that you need more than one backup. But I would mean by that more one that is off site or at least a second device. You should absolutely be able to depend on your backup being reliable baring hardware failure (which is rare). If a backup system can’t be trusted then it isn’t a backup system I’d even use. And it shouldn’t be that hard to reliably backup a *nix system.

If we have to use Time Machine and CCC then that seems to me like the old days where I’d copy some very important data to a USB flash drive and then occasionally burn everything to DVD. It wasn’t a system that was easy or dependable because it relied on me doing something like plugging in the flash drive or putting in a DVD.

That said, I did make a CCC backup, in addition to Time Machine, before I upgraded to High Sierra. I had an extra drive and wanted a bootable backup.

 

[Troneas]

i wouldn't restore from a time machine backup even if it would save humanity from an asteroid crash.


seriously i just never trusted that thing would properly work - its just too intricate and "ornamented" that had me imagining a data "pudding" in my hard drive once it was done with it.



what you should have done is a clean install. at this point you should have all your valuable documents, music, photos etc on the cloud and wiping out the OS and installing the new one should take no more than a couple of hours.


ive updated from El Capitan and my mid-2014 macbook pro has never been as responsive and smooth as it is now.

 

[Martyimac]

Wish I could help but being just an avid user and not an Apple techie, all I can tell you is my 2011 mini (that had betas and the GM installed), my 2015 13" rMBP, and my trash can MP all updated successfully. All my time machine backups are still available, all my login items remained intact, I did not disconnect any of my USB peripherals.
The only commonality among the three of them is the fact that all 3 have SSD's.
So sorry you had issues and i really don't think we yet know what is causing the issues.

 

[EugW]

Attached USB peripherals can be a problem but that’s not just limited to High Sierra.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"I'm not a COMPLETE IDIOT? Oh, I SO am. I performed a TIME MACHINE BACKUP right before installing High Sierra. So, I'll just restore from that pristine copy - no worries. Apple's got my back - I followed their instructions. I'm not a COMPLETE MORON?"

Nope.
You didn't do things the proper way.

What you SHOULD have done:
Create a bootable cloned backup of your old install using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper (note: the "bootable" part is VERY important) BEFORE you attempted the upgrade.

Then, if things didn't go as planned (they didn't):
1. BOOT FROM the bootable cloned backup
2. Re-initialize the internal drive using Disk Utililty
3. RE-CLONE from the bootable backup BACK TO the internal drive.

IF you had done this, things would have gone "easy as pie". You would be back up-and-running in the time it took to connect and boot from the backup, and do the restore using CCC.

Now you know.
Apple's "instructions" are -- well, if not "wrong", certainly NOT "the easy way".

Go forth from this day and learn... a sadder but wiser man.

 

[CrashX]

Thanks - in the future, I'll most definitely be cloning via CCC immediately prior to the installation.

For the gurus, is it just as quick (and technically proper?) to boot with Command-R and use the built-in Restore functionality? That's what I ended up doing to get my CCC clone "back" on my Mac.

But then, what is the point of Time Machine? Just because this site is well-spidered and ranked by Google - Time Machine failed / Time Machine failure / Time Machine sucks - I restored from Time Machine and ended up with just a bunch of directories marked with red exclamation points. This after waiting an exorbitant amount of time for the Time Machine restore process to complete. No drive failure - just Time Machine crapping out because... uhm... it's crap? Yet, all over the web - for backing up your data, Apple's Time Machine is an effective blah blah blah... NO! It quite obviously is not.

In the future, is it best to just relegate it to taking time-stamped shots of working project directories, and just pretending THOSE are viable? After being bit so VERY hard, I certainly don't trust it for restoration of the whole drive.

But yeah - thanks for the heads up on making that CCC clone when I'm planning ahead to do something risky.

Just... WTF if there was an actual hardware failure. Then what? Just roll back with the latest CCC, then go through "picking and choosing" directories from Time Machine to restore, and pray THOSE parts actually restore?

There is so much Apple fanboi sucking up these days, it's a huge dis-service to all of us. Apple is closing in on being the world's first trillion dollar company - I think they can take some criticism?

Especially when they're completely at fault - like in my case. Because THEY don't have a word to say about maintaining a working bootable clone. Nope, Time Machine is da BOMB. And, in my case, an actual ticking time bomb.

And currently, they don't even offer a downloadable version of Sierra for users who might have had their entire computer wiped. I have NO CLUE what I'd do if I hadn't created the clone back in July. What? I should just reinstall High Sierra to please Apple, even though it quite obviously failed my needs? Let's remove all choice, because we create products for idiots who are happy to pay $1,000 to have their faces scanned? Those people don't need choice - they obviously just make horrible ones?

Sorry, ranting again. WHY do people find the need to "protect" a trillion dollar company?

I've been using Macs since my Dad brought home an Apple /// - I think I've more than earned the right to mock my favorite brand REGARDLESS - and certainly when they market a backup solution that is total crap.

Thanks for everyone's input.

And, to anyone wishing to give High Sierra a run for the money, do NOT trust Time Machine. It's still in beta - High Sierra is alpha. It was released because Apple has a schedule to keep and their stock is already tanking thanks to glass-backed over-sized idiot phones and ridiculously over-priced status symbol phones. Jobs left Cook with the edict to stop innovating and just make as much cash as possible, then leave the company to die - because hey, he's not around, so **** it all. If you're just not old enough to have experienced it before - Apple SUCKS without Steve Jobs actively at the helm - just another rotting, stinking Mega Corp with no vision, out for your money. End of story.

OP wrote:
"I'm not a COMPLETE IDIOT? Oh, I SO am. I performed a TIME MACHINE BACKUP right before installing High Sierra. So, I'll just restore from that pristine copy - no worries. Apple's got my back - I followed their instructions. I'm not a COMPLETE MORON?"

Nope.
You didn't do things the proper way.

What you SHOULD have done:
Create a bootable cloned backup of your old install using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper (note: the "bootable" part is VERY important) BEFORE you attempted the upgrade.

Then, if things didn't go as planned (they didn't):
1. BOOT FROM the bootable cloned backup
2. Re-initialize the internal drive using Disk Utililty
3. RE-CLONE from the bootable backup BACK TO the internal drive.

IF you had done this, things would have gone "easy as pie". You would be back up-and-running in the time it took to connect and boot from the backup, and do the restore using CCC.

Now you know.
Apple's "instructions" are -- well, if not "wrong", certainly NOT "the easy way".

Go forth from this day and learn... a sadder but wiser man.

 

[EugW]

I don’t find Time Machine reliable. However, it wasn’t reliable when Jobs was CEO either.

 

[CrashX]

I don’t find Time Machine reliable. However, it wasn’t reliable when Jobs was CEO either.

Was it? I dunno - I think I still have just about every Mac I've ever owned, and none of them has ever crashed on me before. So I've never had to test the Jobs-era Time Machine backups. Anyone hold a seething hatred for Steve Jobs for turning Apple into CrApple? Jony was a pretentious little tw*t who found everything "so uh-MAZE-ing" - but even he was a cute lovable little Apple character. Where's HIS batch of Kool-Aid when I need it? Uh-MAZE-ing!

Tim Cook is like this boring bean counter who gets a pass because he's gay - then we have Craig, who seems like he just wishes to genuinely apologize for what's become of Apple. "I'm not STEVE - leave me ALONE! I'm SO SORRY. Please.. just STOP IT! I can't DO THIS JOB! It's a PHONE that... SCANS YOUR FACE... sometimes... REALLY!?! Tim makes me do this! HELP!"

Okay, sorry - that's all "tongue-in-cheek" - as quickly as I can get angry at Apple, I tend to just laugh it off with bad jokes.

 

[EugW]

Time Machine came out a decade ago. I gave up on it about half a dozen years ago. Easier just to do automated data backups, and drive clones as necessary.

Actually I now hold most of my data on a NAS, and that NAS gets backed up daily to local storage and also gets daily backed up to a second NAS over the network in a closet in the opposite side of the house. I also backup some user folders on my Macs as necessary and make periodic bootable backups. And I always have a recent bootable backup or two plus an additional data backup before a major OS upgrade.

I also make backups of important data to drives which in the past would reside in my office for my home data, but I recently got a safety deposit box, and data drives will go in there, for at least the most important stuff.

I had thought of cloud backups too but didn't want to pay the monthly premium just yet. However, these days it's getting more reasonable with iCloud costing US$10 per month for 2 TB.

 

[CrashX]

My OCD just creamed itself - that is AWESOME!

Totally with you on the cloud - makes zero sense to me to pay a monthly fee when backup drives are so cheap. Also, if there's a fire, then "I almost died in a fire - yeah, I lost stuff - it was a FIRE. I almost died. Yeah, well I almost died - so I don't really care. Nope, still don't care. Oh, I'm fired? Fine - I almost just died in a FIRE - I'm jumping in my Jeep and becoming a vagabond, because HEY - I ALMOST JUST BURNED UP IN A FIRE!"

Or, for free, I could just keep a drive in my Jeep "cloud"? Whatever is gonna take my house AND my Jeep better kill me quite dead. And by the time they got done patching me up, the Cloud would have run into some problem with my credit card and deleted my stuff anyway?

So - what software do you use for the OCD creamery? Is it automated? I want everything to just happen for me automagically - the grand lure of "Time Machine" - while I drop acid and imagine Craig doing a Cowardly Lion bit in the Land of Oz with Tim Cook as key grip and Steve Ballmer throwing Flying Monkeys at me. I don't have time to be clicking buttons and waiting for stuff. I want my pudding NOW! Stupid meat...

Until then, can you post a video of whatever that is you've concocted? You must sleep like a newborn babe. GLORIOUS!

Time Machine came out a decade ago. I gave up on it about half a dozen years ago. Easier just to do data backups and drive clones when necessary.

Actually I hold most of my data on a NAS, and that NAS gets backed up daily to local storage and also gets daily backed up to a second NAS over the network in a closet in the opposite side of the house. I also backup some user folders on my Macs as necessary and make periodic bootable backups. And I always have a recent bootable backup or two plus an additional data backup before a major OS upgrade.

I also make backups of important data to drives which in the past would reside in my office for my home data, but I recently got a safety deposit box, and data drives will go in there, for at least the most important stuff.

I had thought of cloud backups too but didn't want to pay the monthly premium just yet. Although these days it's getting more reasonable with iCloud costing US$10 per month for 2 TB.

 

[EugW]

The NASes and their backups run themselves.

For bootable clones I have used SuperDuper! until now, but will need to switch to Carbon Copy Cloner, as SuperDuper! doesn't do APFS.

 

[dacreativeguy]

I'm just a casual user - and I'm VERY LUCKY to have my computer back in operational condition.

Yeah, I have my fun - the whole tongue-in-cheek "Apple sucks since Steve Jobs died" bit.

But, until now, I was kidding. Not anymore - not after High Sierra. I have no clue WHAT they're smokin' - but trust me, kids, you do NOT want any. Seriously bad stuff.

I have NO CLUE what's wrong with High Sierra. I'm not a techie. And so the techies can probably explain what I did wrong. But, in this case, it seems there are quite a few that would agree that what I did wrong was to TRUST Apple and install the piece of garbage in the first place.

No, it didn't completely tank my late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. It just slowed everything way down and glitched and sputtered - it was just a terrible user experience.

So HEY - NO PROBLEM! - I can just downgrade. Certainly that should work, yeah? My own stupidity for installing Apple's new public betas that are now released as "Golden Masters" or whatnot - right? I'm an IDIOT - all on me.

Yep, yep. My bad. Okay, then let's DOWNGRADE - in my case, back to El Capitan, because I had no need for Siri on my laptop. Sorry, it was called Sierra. My bad again. Anyway, BACK to El Capitan for me.

I'm not a COMPLETE IDIOT? Oh, I SO am. I performed a TIME MACHINE BACKUP right before installing High Sierra. So, I'll just restore from that pristine copy - no worries. Apple's got my back - I followed their instructions. I'm not a COMPLETE MORON?

Yep, turns out I am. Apple only allows ONE Time Machine Backup, and my trusty Mac didn't burp out any warnings or relate any failures. Nope - it just...

FAILED. COMPLETELY. Little red exclamation points next to all my directories. So I looked that up - apparently, we TRUST Time Machine to save us, but... NO no no no no... Tons of advice on how to implement Time Machine - zip on what to do when it fails. It's just good practice I suppose to waste my time doing Time Machine backups?

GRAAAHHHHRRRRRR!!!!!!!!! Oh, I HATE Apple at this point... and especially Bean Counter Tim and Poor Fumbling Craig Fedher-Star Trek Alien. Before - I felt sorry for THEM - what with them having to live up to the standard Steve set, and failing so horribly miserably - but now...

Okay - not stepping into a full on rant.

Luckily for me, I'd questioned Apple enough to use Carbon Copy Cloner - which is the ONLY REASON I was able to restore my Mac.

I just can't BELIEVE how HORRIBLE an experience I just went through -

And, of course, no one SHOULD care about my idiotic problems with my Mac.

But - if you were planning on MAYBE installing High Sierra over the weekend - because hey, it's the weekend - I'm not in the position to advise anyone, but... DO NOT DO IT.

And, if anyone cares to read this and might explain to me why I should EVER even use Time Machine EVER again - please enlighten me? When I needed it to WORK - it FAILED on me.

So no - I won't be trusting Tim and Craig to unleash APFS (Apple's Piece of F** S**) file system on my Mac where I actually NEED to access my files. Same goes for their new Video and Photo formats. Nope - don't trust those... Apple Geniuses.

That is my story. If you choose to venture forth into High Sierra - I wish you better luck.

I'm done trusting Apple for now - as far as I'm concerned, they're just forever out of a Jobs.

Apple clearly prioritizes their QA testing from old to new. I had a horrible time with my 2013 MBP as well. Fortunately I don't trust anyone, so I had Time Machine and CCC backups. Therefore, I only had an annoying evening, rather than a devastating event. With Time Machine built in and external HDs so cheap, there is no excuse to not protect yourself.

 

[Cougarcat]

The NASes and their backups run themselves.

For bootable clones I have used SuperDuper! until now, but will need to switch to Carbon Copy Cloner, as SuperDuper! doesn't do APFS.

SuperDuper has a public beta with APFS support on their blog. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/

 

[trifid]

Is High Sierra the Mac’s Vista?

 

[m4v3r1ck]

OP wrote:
"I'm not a COMPLETE IDIOT? Oh, I SO am. I performed a TIME MACHINE BACKUP right before installing High Sierra. So, I'll just restore from that pristine copy - no worries. Apple's got my back - I followed their instructions. I'm not a COMPLETE MORON?"

Nope.
You didn't do things the proper way.

What you SHOULD have done:
Create a bootable cloned backup of your old install using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper (note: the "bootable" part is VERY important) BEFORE you attempted the upgrade.

Then, if things didn't go as planned (they didn't):
1. BOOT FROM the bootable cloned backup
2. Re-initialize the internal drive using Disk Utililty
3. RE-CLONE from the bootable backup BACK TO the internal drive.

IF you had done this, things would have gone "easy as pie". You would be back up-and-running in the time it took to connect and boot from the backup, and do the restore using CCC.

Now you know.
Apple's "instructions" are -- well, if not "wrong", certainly NOT "the easy way".

Go forth from this day and learn... a sadder but wiser man.

Best advise in this thread! Good luck in your quest...

Cheers

 

[GerritV]

I feel your pain OP.
I upgraded my 3 MacBook Pro's and had issues on each and every one of them.
In fact, I just get off the phone with AppleCare because the 3rd upgrade was in a loop trying to configure my iCloud account. I was asked to logout first but couldn't because my iCloud was being configured - which seemed to fail. Gee...

So if you ask me personally, the High Sierra installer was a big fat mess.

Another thing for this backup advice that keeps coming back in cases like this: all of my documents are in a cloud (no, NOT the iCloud - but the ones that actually do work). So I might even be bold enough and say I don't need a backup, there's nothing on my machines except applications that I would never ever restore from a backup.

All in all, having a backup is not an excuse for a messed up system installer.
Finally, if you insist on having a backup, TimeMachine is not at all what you should use. That too failed on me on every single occasion I needed it in the past.

YMMV

 

[simonsi]

Not sure what the OP means about TM only allowing one backup, Ive always used two, one at home and one at work. Ive also restored from TM twice and both were successful.

Key I think is allowing TM to take a full, fresh backup after every upgrade - works for me at least, I also use CCC for clone backups, cant fault it...

 

[GerritV]

Is High Sierra the Mac’s Vista?

Close, in my count however it's Mac's Vista v4