Mojave straight to Big Sur - experiences anyone?

[jz0309]

Ah! This is almost exactly what I'm in the middle of now. Finally going to Big Sur. Haven't hit first reboot yet. I saw that note about moving 32 bit apps. So just to be safe I moved Aperture over to my Mojave Volume. This is the one thing I can't do without with a decade of Aperture projects!

So I can boot into a lean/mean Mojave and run Aperture, and HOPEFULLY after going directly to BigSur, I'll be able to use the upgraded Reminders! Reminders upgraded doesn't work with Mojave! SHEESH, so THIS is one of the reasons I'm upgrading...

I'll wait on Monterey a bit. Please give us the update if you haven't already on how that goes!

Thanks for the update it was very valuable.

I'm on a Mac Pro Trashcan Late 2013. Monterey will be my last upgrade if I can squeeze it out. Then it may be time for an M1X.

But Aperture is still SO MUCH FASTER AND MORE POWERFUL THAN PHOTOS. Such an amazing tool!!! WHY APPLE, DID YOU ABANDON IT??? PHOTOS still can't combine or divide libraries?!?! How is that possible? Oh because you want a paid subscription to iCloud. (How Tim, can we keep our stuff in iCloud "forever" if we stop paying? Eh?) Free Five Terabytes of iCloud I've been asking for years!

Ok about to click Restart...

Still on Big Sur on my iMac, currently evaluating whether to do a fresh install vs upgrade.
Re Aperture, yes it WAS great, my managed library crashed like 3 or so years ago (there's a post of mine somewhere here) and I could not recover from TM backup, I had keywords, face recognition, everything. Luckily I was able to extract the photos and decided to go the Lightroom route. I now have my photos in a folder structure on my external SSD and the index/catalog lives on the internal SSD, works very well for me with now 75k+ photos.
There is some SW that allows you to run 32 bit apps in BS, forgetting the name right now, but, you really should start to plan to move off Aperture, it's not going to run forever but a planned transition is definetly better than what I had to go through ...

 

[jz0309]

I used it for iTunes and it works great, since I am leery of the Music app (at least the stories behind it messing up your iTunes library when converting).

yea, that was exactly the reason for me to hold off on Big Sur ... I have managed to totally clean up my movies (it was a mess after the upgrade) but havn't tackled music yet, it is a mess, but have not really been using Music as of late.

 

[jdoyle]

I have an older iMac 5k than you. Late 2015. I skipped Catalina (Apples Vista Moment) and went from Mojave to Big Sur. My experience? Well I took a hit on performance for the first few releases. But I have to say the last few updates they did restored all the speed and zippyness I had lost. It runs so well now. ( I have 16Gb Ram and 1TB Fusion). So I love it now. I tried Monterey since I saw feedback that performance was about the same. But it's not. Whether that the OS or the Bugs with first version. I went back to Big Sur. It does everything I want on this older iMac until the new 27inch Apple Silicon one comes out when I will upgrade.

 

[iJamesBS]

If Aperture is must, you might be interested in Retroactive:

GitHub - cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive: Retroactive has been discontinued. You should transition from Retroactive to supported apps such as Music, iTunes for Windows, iMazing, Photos, Darktable, Lightroom Classic, and DaVinci Resolve.

Retroactive has been discontinued. You should transition from Retroactive to supported apps such as Music, iTunes for Windows, iMazing, Photos, Darktable, Lightroom Classic, and DaVinci Resolve. - ...

github.com

I used it for iTunes and it works great, since I am leery of the Music app (at least the stories behind it messing up your iTunes library when converting).

Yeah, I saw that for iTunes, but didn't know exactly what it was, so I'm looking forward to what it can do for me. Though at this moment Time Machine and my Mojave Partition are my new friends as my Big Sur installation is also hung up. :-( BUT if I CAN manage to get my system all the way to Big Sur, I'll give it a shot!

I can say right now though that booting in Safe Mode, creating a new user and getting into Big Sur was EXTREMELY SLUGGISH for some reason. And when I got there, all my installed Applications from over the years from Mojave were gone from the "- Data" disk and that includes when I went booted into Mojave. I fortunately had enough disk space on the partition to pull in all the Applications and critical information from my Time Machine backup to get back to business though BackBlaze is probably wondering what the heck is going on... I may have to roll back the entire thing to Mojave and then maybe try going to Catalina first... But first that mdworker possibility I've got to look into that.

 

[nothingtoseehere]

At the end of the year, when Mojave is no longer supported, I will update directly to Monterey. MBP 2015 as well.

I will keep a bootable backup from my Mojave installation. Just in case…

So I did the jump 10.14.6 -> 12.0.1 today. So far, everything runs well. No "clean install" but simply upgrading.

 

[harriska2]

Being the nervous Nellie, I have a Samsung T7 external SSD that I just installed Monty onto. So I'm booting between Mojave and Monty. Installing apps onto Monty and setting up mail, etc. Sooooo coool. Missing my favorites toolbar across the top of Safari. All my data are on external spinners (10TB).

 

[Cayenne1]

I went straight from High Sierra to Monterey via a total clean install from bootable USB. Reloaded every app manually from installers. I have around 40 applications not including those in the base OS. Key to me is avoiding Migration Assistant that basically overlays old onto new.

No issues and Monterey runs much better than HS. I also have Parallels XP and Win10 VMs with PC only apps not included in the 40 mentioned above. These VMs also run fine.

My biggest concern is that Carbon Copy Cloner cannot create bootable images of Monterey.

 

[harriska2]

I went straight from High Sierra to Monterey via a total clean install from bootable USB. Reloaded every app manually from installers. I have around 40 applications not including those in the base OS. Key to me is avoiding Migration Assistant that basically overlays old onto new.

No issues and Monterey runs much better than HS. I also have Parallels XP and Win10 VMs with PC only apps not included in the 40 mentioned above. These VMs also run fine.

My biggest concern is that Carbon Copy Cloner cannot create bootable images of Monterey.

I’m finding some apps haven’t quite migrated fully to Big Sur or higher (ABBYY Finereader, ehem).

 

[weirdsmith]

Big Sur didn't want to finish updating. It got stuck on the last bit.

Yeah, that's a bug and it got me as well. I ended up doing a clean reinstall of Big Sur and restoring from Time Machine.