Is it safe to upgrade to Sequoia?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Hi everyone! What is the feedback on macOS Sequoia so far? Is ist safe to upgrade? I don’t want anything to happen to my favourite writing software :smiley:
Thanks for any info!
Cheers, Johanna

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Zero problems here

M2 Max 32GB

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I have not personally upgraded, and probably won’t for a while.

But we haven’t seen the flood of issues that new Mac OS releases sometimes bring.

As always, make sure you have adequate backups, and installing a major upgrade when you have an imminent deadline is usually a bad idea.

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Upgraded this weekend. The only thing that’s different is that the “cursor/insertion point width hack” I used on Sonoma doesn’t seem to work on Sequoia, so that’s back, which is irritating. I am learning to live with it by making my insertion point a very pale grey (thanks Scrivener) vs the default light blue, which is just annoying on a white background next to black text.

So far, that’s it though, no other issues.

EDIT: Oh and I should say, especially as an ancient iPhone user, there’s very little reason I can see to upgrade to Sequoia right now. Some minor improvements to Finder window handling, new Passwords app. The ‘big’ feature is the ability to basically mirror your iPhone, but it only works with iOS 18, I believe.

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Thanks a lot for your info!

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Thanks! No deadlines at the moment, but still backups are important of course. :upside_down_face:

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Thanks for the info! Very valid point regarding older iPhones. Mine is also not on iOS 18, so I can easily lean back and wait.

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Apparently the “new shiny” in Sequoia is the Apple Intelligence stuff, which is coming (to the US only) in 15.1. I’m sure that will introduce enough weirdness to keep us all entertained.

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Should have known. I sort of ignored it because I know “AI” (oh Apple, didn’t you think iAI would work as a product name?) is only going to be supported in newer phones.

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I’ve had no issues here.

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I am on a mac studio M1 Max and have no issues at all.

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No issues. Works like a charm. I’m on 15.1 beta and all is fine. M1 Mac mini

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Thanks a lot! From what I have heard, it is safe to upgrade, if I want to.

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I’m worried I’m having the opposite situation. The MacMini updated to Sequoia 15.0.1 last night, and now I can’t get either .scriv files (one from 2023, one brand-new) to stay open. Scrivener is up to date at vsn 3.3.6. The pop-up is simply “There was a problem saving the project ‘Project-2-Letters.scriv’. Not all recent edits could be saved. Files that could be recovered have been saved to…”
Both projects are on my domestic network server, and firmware is up to date. Is there anywhere else in Scrivener/Sequoia that I should check for updates?

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Permissions issues are not unheard of after a system update. The best way to check for these is to locate the places these projects are stored, in Finder, and make sure you can create new files there, load existing files (other than the projects) and save changes to what you can load. If all of those things seem generally possible, then make sure the permissions in the project itself are not damaged. I’ll sometimes see odd things when loading Get Info, like it is perpetually scanning for a user name that no longer exists, and everyone else is set to read-only or no permission at all, on some files after an update.

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Quick test.

Try a Save As to your local hard drive and see if it works fine there. I’ve seen occasional issues in the past with network servers when updating, but that was with Win servers.

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Many thanks, AmberV. From the newly Sequoia’d Mac Mini, I can indeed add and delete, open, write and edit other files in the network folder that stores my earlier project. Everything looked normal at Get Info, but I went through the permissions update on the earlier project anyway. No luck: it still crashed upon opening from the Mini.

So I went and booted up my Powerbook (running Catalina), and tried opening the earlier project – Scrivener said it was open in another location. (Not so: Scrivener is closed on the Mac Mini after the project crashed again.) I made a new copy, in a new folder, in the network drive – and it works like a charm. I made a new folder and Scriv file for my second project on the network drive from the laptop: again, works like a charm, lets me add chapters, text, etc.

The PITA is that Photoshop nagged about the Sequoia upgrade, so unpicking the carpet to revert to Big Sur, the last OS I had that worked perfectly, is probably not an option.

Many thanks!

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I’ll try save-as down to the Mac Mini using the newly made October copy and see what happens – thanks for the suggestion!

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It could be that it got far enough into trying to load that it created the lock file that indicates a copy of Scrivener is working on the project. As you can expect, this is one of the very first things it tries to do, and one of the very last things it removes when closing cleanly. That’s interesting though, because it does imply that at some point it could write to it well enough to make that file!

Well, glad to hear the “refresh” of it seemed to work. For your other projects, you may be able to recreate that by using recent zipped backups rather than having to haul out the old laptop. Unzipping a project is a pretty good way of rebuilding everything from scratch (and can clean up a lot of permission issues too).

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I had major problems on Oct 12–still reconstructing. Seems to have been an Apple/OneDrive issue. I hate OneDrive–it’s a work thing. Trying to disentangle and beyond frustrated with these incompatibilities and with forced OneDrive file stuff.