Site icon

How to upgrade from an older Mac operating system to macOS Catalina or Big Sur

Apple supports macOS migrations back several releases, but you can wind up with too big a gap.

Many people remember Mac OS X 10.6.8 fondly. Not just 10.6 Snow Leopard, but particularly its very mature 10.6.8 release, the final one in that series. It’s considered a stable and perfectly fine version. It’s not a problem—until they want to move to a newer system, particularly macOS Catalina or Big Sur, and find there’s no migration path.

Apple offers Migration Assistant both when setting up a Mac (whether new or erased) and as an app within macOS, particularly to migrate user accounts and applications. As a source, you can use a Time Machine backup, a disk image copy of your macOS startup volume (via a cloning app, for instance), or another Mac.

But Migration Assistant has its limits: in Catalina and Big Sur, you must migrate from Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan or later. Attempts to copy from older installations lead to an error.

Read more at MacWorld.com

Exit mobile version