Catalina clean install

[RickyB]

Hi,

I have a 2012 max mini with 2 internal drives. One, a 240 Gb SSD contains the startup volume (Mojave) and a Windows 10 partition. The other drive, a 1Tb SSHD, contains most of the user drives. Have a 2 Tb Time machine disk which

it is running a bit slow and I want to do a clean install of Catalina, retaining user documents, photos, music etc but not applications as I only want to install what i need.

Am I likely to run into any problems given that there are non-standard installations? I am not concerned about the windows 10 partition, I can delete and the reinstall windows (or not) later.

thanks

 

[Taz Mangus]

What do you mean when you say you have non-standard installations?

Probably the best way to preserve your user data is with a backup. Do a erase and install of Catalina and then migrate your user data from backup. There are 2 ways to migrate your user data, use the macOS or manually copy over user data from the backup.

 

[HDFan]

Make sure you have at least two backups, one which is not TM. TM backups are more likely to fail than clones from things like Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

[RickyB]

Thanks for the replies. I called it non-standard because the user drives are on a different volume. I’d quite like to leave the user drives volume as it is and just do a clean install on the SSD. But I don’t know if that’s possible.