Hey guys, I just upgraded to Catalina and I’m wondering how this will affect my backups I’m doing on my external drive. Is there anything I should know before plugging it back in and running a time machine backup? I want to keep using the same drive (not buy a new one), but also not lose the old Mojave backups and system images just in case. Any thoughts? Thanks!
every time apple releases a new major operating system, after successfully updating my machines, i immediately erase my Time Machine backups (i keep two separate Time Machine backups), and start again fresh with Time Machine bundles based on the new OS.
especially for Catalina, where the file system is very different and is designed to track info in very different ways, and especially as of the current version (10.15.2) still has so many bugs still in it, keeping Time Machine based on receiving data from the
current OS is the safest way.
i have never understood keeping ancient Time Machine copies, as long as you have been able to successfully kept up to preserve all yr data without loss.
Time Machine is best thought of as a way of preserving recent states of data. recent to me definitely only includes data states as of the most recent major OS change and not those data backed up before a major OS revision.
using USB or other matter to preserve data from long time periods in the past is the way to go for normal data file backups.
non-data files, such as system files, from ancient history will never be of help to you when/if you try to use them in Catalina.
thinking of Time Machine as a long term systems and data backup, no matter how many ancient OS the backups originate from, is asking for problems, especially with Catalina.
