ONE UP Mac OS

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  • When you set up a new Mac, the Setup Assistant offers to copy your files. To use this tool on a Mac, do one of the following: Connect two Macs using a Thunderbolt or Ethernet cable, or make sure they are both connected to the same wi-fi network.
  • The current Mac operating system is macOS, originally named 'Mac OS X' until 2012 and then 'OS X' until 2016. Developed between 1997 and 2001 after Apple's purchase of NeXT, Mac OS X brought an entirely new architecture based on NeXTSTEP, a Unix system, that eliminated many of the technical challenges that the classic Mac OS faced.

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Big Sur is a major upgrade to macOS, and some people are ready for it. However, if you’ve been running Mojave or an earlier version of macOS to keep 32-bit applications running, you may still have held back.

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If you’re otherwise ready for moving forward, you have a few options to keep a Mojave installation active.

In each case, I’d recommend starting by making a full disk image backup of your current macOS setup with Disk Utility, SuperDuper!, or Carbon Copy Cloner. In case something goes wrong, you can revert to it or restore from it.

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Your easiest path is to buy or use a sufficiently large external drive and clone to it directly from your current Mac. This lets you even boot from it in a pinch, so you don’t have a lengthy restore process to get back to work or figure out what went wrong.

Here are your best options.

Put Mojave on an external drive

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If you don’t think you’ll need Mojave that often, and will then use it for a period of time whenever you need it, install a fresh version of Mojave onto an external drive and copy applications and files you need. (Download the Mojave installer from the Mac App Store if you haven’t kept it on hand.)

Alternatively, you can upgrade your Mac to Catalina or Big Sur, then boot into the external drive I suggested making a copy onto above by selecting it from the Startup Disk preference pane. Remove any duplicated files, so you don’t wind up editing material on the old drive for which your master copy is on your upgraded internal drive.

When you want to switch between Mojave and a later macOS, use the Startup Disk preference pane again. You can also hold down Option after restarting to select a startup volume.

Put Mojave on a partition

The modern APFS filesystem that Apple moved Macs to in High Sierra (non-Fusion drives) and Mojave (all drives) makes it easy to create multiple installations of macOS on a single SSD or hard disk drive, as long as you have the space required.

In fact, it’s such a great idea that Apple offers official support for it and a detailed guide for the process that I won’t recapitulate. Read Apple’s instructions here.

As with an external volume, you use the Startup Disk preference pane to switch startup volumes.

Go virtual

If you either need Mojave all the time alongside Catalina or Big Sur, or you need it occasionally and don’t want the fuss of rebooting your system twice to move into it and back out, you can run Mojave (and other versions of macOS) in emulation through Parallels or VMware Fusion.

With either Parallels or VMware Fusion, you can start with a clone of your Mojave installation or install one from scratch, and then keep Mojave running in a bottle forever. Launch the app when you need Mojave; otherwise, it can stay on standby and no reboot is required.

Cost is the only thing that might hold you back. Parallels costs $79.99 for the home edition; VMware Fusion is $149 for its basic version. VMware also makes a more limited, personal-use-only version of Fusion available at no cost for home users. These are one-time prices, not yearly licensing fees, but the changes made in each version of macOS related to virtualization software is significant enough that you will need to purchase an upgrade each time you want to move to a later version of macOS. Parallels right now charges $49.99 for a version upgrade, while VMware has as $79 price tag on it.

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader John.

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Over time, your Mac probably accumulates a lot of cruft. Old applications you no longer use, data you have no use for, a desktop full of icons (only four of which you actually ever use)…you know what I mean. With so many people working from home lately, the problem has only gotten worse.

Now is as good a time as any to tidy up your Mac, freeing up storage space and probably CPU cycles and RAM in the process. Here are a few tips to make quick work of your Mac “spring cleaning.”

Optimize Storage

Open the Storage Management app, either by using Spotlight (Command-space) or by clicking the Apple logo in the upper left of the menu bar, choosing About This Mac, clicking the Storage tab, then Manage.

In the Recommendations tab you’ll see a number of useful options, like Store in iCloud and Empty Trash Automatically. The Optimize Storage solution will get rid of things like old TV shows you’ve already watched and old email attachments when you’re low on storage space.

Take a look at your Applications and Documents

While you’re in the Storage Management app, click on the Applications tab in the left column. You can see all your installed applications here and sort them by size, easily deleting apps you haven’t used in ages.

Then, click on Documents in the left tab. There are several sections here, like Large Files and Unsupported Apps, that are worth perusing. Big library files (for apps like Lightroom or Final Cut Pro) are likely to show up here, and you might not want to mess with them. But you may have old large files and documents, or apps that no longer even work on your version of macOS, that you can safely remove.

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Get your desktop under control

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If your desktop is littered with icons, you should probably tidy things up a bit. Right-click (two-finger tap on a trackpad) any open space and choose Clean Up to get things arranged neatly, or Clean Up By to sort them as well. Consider the Use Stacks feature to automatically stack-up files of the same type into a single icon. Just click on that icon to open the stack. This can really tidy up your desktop!

Try DaisyDisk

Power users that really want to clean out their Mac’s storage may want to check out a third party app like DaisyDisk ($9.99). It’s a simple and clear way to see everything on your Mac, or any other attached storage device or drive. It can do things like dig into the mysterious “Other” category and help you clear out what you don’t need.

It may seem unnecessary to pay money for an app that just helps you delete stuff from your Mac’s storage, but there’s a lot of value in disk analyzers like this. It can really be eye-opening to see exactly what’s filling up your Mac’s SSD.