I have a refurbished Macbook running 10.10 Yosemite. It’s a 32bit machine from mid 2010. Is it safe for me to upgrade to 10.13? This machine has already been upgraded from Lion to Yosemite.
Is there a way for me to try the 10.13 upgrade, but revert back to Yosemite if it doesn’t run on my machine well? Buying a new mac laptop is currently off the table.
I’ve never updated a mac machine before so please be gentle with me. Most of my computing experience comes from using Windows!
The main reason I want to try it is so I can run Scriv Mac 3 and Highland 2!
I’m not sure there is a way to restore back to a previous MacOS except to restore the entire machine from a Time Machine backup. Here’s a guide I found for restoring to a previous OS: macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-s … e-3581872/
Do, of course, run a final Time Machine backup, or other full system backup before you start though. Upgrades are pretty painless, other than how long it takes the machine to do it’s thing, and sometimes the computer is slow while it updates its search indexes.
simplest solution is use an external boot disk for installing 10.13. I do that regularly to make sure upgrades are “safeish”. Then, if you are “O. M. G. make the pain stop!!!”, just reboot from internal drive and you are back to the old OS. You will still be able to read data from the external drive, but apps that are NOT using backward compatible file formats… they will make you cry. Just fair warning.
Before I get started, I suggest you look up how much RAM you have installed and make sure that it’s sufficient. Older OSs don’t require as much as newer ones do. I have 8G of RAM, but 4G is sufficient. I’d hesitate to upgrade if you only have 2G, simply because it’ll be sluggish.
So, probably the fastest way to get a restored version of your old install is to use SuperDuper. If you’re comfortable doing that, then this is what I’d do:
First download SuperDuper. The trial will let you do a complete duplication of your internal hard drive to an external.
Perform that duplication of your hard drive to the external.
If you’re with me so far, then you have two options…
1-reboot, using the external drive as your boot drive (there are apple.com articles on how to do this, just search for “boot from external drive”). Then upgrade that installation and try it out for a bit. If you like it, then you can use SuperDuper to copy that updated version of your computer to the internal drive, and you’re done.
2-Eject the external drive; it’s now your fastest way to restore your current installation. Then perform the upgrade on your internal drive and try it out. If you like it, then you’re done. If you don’t like it, then you can boot from the external drive and use SuperDuper to restore everything to your old installation.
I suggest SuperDuper because it’s far faster to do this kind of restore than using Time Machine (which can take most of a day over old USB or even Firewire 800). It’s also the easiest way to clone your hard drive to experiment with it. If you want to just upgrade your computer and try it out, which would make this option #3, then you don’t need SuperDuper at all, so long as your TM backups are up to date.
The choice is yours–how confident are you with any of these methods?
I’d echo what RDALE has said. Also, while you can use SuperDuper for free to set up a new boot disk, it is not expensive, and once you’re up and running to your satisfaction, I’d buy it if you can, because then you can set it up to do rapid, incremented bootable backups of your internal HD.
That said, until August/September last year, I was running MacOS 12 and then briefly 13 on a 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM late 2010 MacBook Air. It did work perfectly well running Scrivener 3 betas, but I realised that it was labouring a bit and that I wouldn’t be able to upgrade the OS further, so traded it in. But with 4MB RAM you should be fine.
