Migrating: Catalina to Monterey ???

[Glenny2lappies]

Had a truly miserable time moving from Mojave to Catalina. Aside from application updates, my large music collection really struggled.

Have an Intel 16" MacBook Pro. Running various applications but really need to keep VMWare.

Any recommendations? What would the pain points be?

 

[mikzn]

Had a truly miserable time moving from Mojave to Catalina. Aside from application updates, my large music collection really struggled.

Yeah Catalina was a shock for sure - especially the music App vs iTunes

I don't think you will find it as bad migrating to Monterey from Catalina - Music is very similar in Monterey but more polished and developed

That said I dropped the streaming side of Apple and switched to Spotify at Catalina / Music - no regrets - never going back to apple for streaming

My big issue was artwork - moving from Mojave to Catalina destroyed my carefully crafted artwork and meta data - especially for classical CD's - this does not seem as bad from Catalina to Big Sur or to Monterey

The search function has it's ups and downs - I prefer to use the Filter field - Alt+Cmd+F
not sure why they hide that and you have to constantly invoke it and repeat to get a decent search of your local music ?

 

[Glenny2lappies]

Catalina seemed like a bad dream -- something Microsoft would inflict on it's "users". It took ages to get the thing working. Updating my MacBook Pro to the 16" version forced that upon me.

Thinking about it, Mojave had bugs that took many releases to fix, especially with an Apple Thunderbolt Display.

All of this is why I'm underwhelmed at the thought of updating (I refuse to call it an upgrade) just to get some change in icons or some application I don't use.

Great cartoon

 

[Huntn]

I recently upgraded from Catalina to Monterey and the update itself took place smoothly, nothing like the time I had upgrading to Catalina. Before upgrading I did run Disk Repair and a maintenance session of Onyx. Since upgrading to Monterey I am noticing some small but annoying things...

 

[Fishrrman]

What I'd do (short version):

1. Get an external drive large enough to hold the contents of your internal drive.
2. Use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper (DO NOT use time machine) to create a bootable clone of the internal drive.
3. DO A TEST BOOT, just to be sure.
4. Now, boot to internet recovery:
Command-OPTION-R
5. Once the utilities load, open disk utility.
6. Go to the view menu and choose "show all devices" VERY IMPORTANT
7. In the list on the left, choose the topmost line (physical drive) and erase it to APFS with GUID partition format.
8. Quit disk utility and open the OS installer
9. Start clicking through. The Mac will restart one or more times, and the screen may go black for a few minutes with no progress bar. BE PATIENT.
10. Once the install is done, you'll see the initial startup screen (choose your language).
11. Start clicking through. At the appropriate moment, setup assistant will ask if you wish to migrate from another drive. YES, you want to do this.
12. Connect the backup and give setup assistant time to digest everything.
13. I suggest you migrate everything. Again, give the migration time to complete.
14. When done, you should see you old login screen. Log in and "look around".

 

[harriska2]

I installed Big Sur on an external Samsung 7 SSD and use the option key to boot to either the internal Mojave SSD or the Big Sur SSD. I did use CCC to do a bootable backup to an external.