Restoring from a time machine backup for this the first time...is this for real?

[puggles]

Long story short I installed the Big Sur beta on my daily driver and everything broke...lesson learned. I was expecting a few hours but almost 20?! My backup is about 350 GB. This will at least put me back on Catalina correct?

 

[casperes1996]

There’s a reason it’s not yet a public beta, though for me it’s actually been really quite stable so far. All the things that broke for you; did you report it to Apple with Feedback Assistant?

The speed of restoring a time machine backup greatly depends on how fast the drive you back up to is. If it’s a spinning drive on the network That number is not unrealistic, no. I have a 1TB backup on a spinning drive on the network and I expect pulling it all would take about 2 days.

 

[puggles]

There’s a reason it’s not yet a public beta, though for me it’s actually been really quite stable so far. All the things that broke for you; did you report it to Apple with Feedback Assistant?

The speed of restoring a time machine backup greatly depends on how fast the drive you back up to is. If it’s a spinning drive on the network That number is not unrealistic, no. I have a 1TB backup on a spinning drive on the network and I expect pulling it all would take about 2 days.

Thanks it is a spinning drive on the network.

Broke everything was probably an overstatement but Luminar 4 wouldn’t export photos, Steam doesn’t work at all, and Netflix is a black screen in Safari when using sidecar...those are probably me 3 most used functions so it just doesn’t work for me. I did report everything.

 

[glenthompson]

For the future I recommend making a SSD clone of your drive before major OS upgrades. Restore is much faster.

 

[Taz Mangus]

My suggestion is to install a beta, like Big Sur, to a new partition on your internal drive. I would do a clean install of the beta.

 

[casperes1996]

Broke everything was probably an overstatement but Luminar 4 wouldn’t export photos, Steam doesn’t work at all, and Netflix is a black screen in Safari when using sidecar...those are probably me 3 most used functions so it just doesn’t work for me. I did report everything.

Ah, yes. Steam is also problematic for me, reporting no games to work with macOS, and the installer button not working.
But good you reported it. Hopefully things will be fixed by release