Next month (October), we should all be able to upgrade to macOS 11 Big Sur. If you’ve decided that you’re going to move at least one of your Macs up to this new major release, you’ll need to start preparing now. Here are some pointers based on my experience with previous upgrades, and what’s changing in Big Sur.
These are primarily aimed at those upgrading just one step from Catalina. Don’t forget that Big Sur builds on the major changes of macOS 10.15. If you’re planning to upgrade from Mojave or earlier, you should also read this article about upgrading to Catalina, and this one about residual problems in Catalina.
Time Machine and backups
Apple has announced, and has been testing in betas, the most substantial change to Time Machine for many years, which enables it to make backups to APFS volumes. It has also been fixing at least some of the bugs in the normal backups made to HFS+ volumes. Although the latter should remain backwards compatible with previous versions of Time Machine, backups on APFS will at best have limited compatibility.
Before any upgrade, regardless of whether you intend persevering with the existing system to HFS+ or switching to APFS, you must not only ensure that you have a full backup using Time Machine, if you use it, but should also make a thorough backup using an independent product such as Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!, ChronoSync, or similar.
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