Quote:
Originally Posted by albee1952
As with every update or upgrade, have a backup plan in place first. Mine would be to clone the system drive, swap the clone into the computer and update that. If it works, dandy. If it goes sour, put the old drive back in.  |
Uh please no, not with macOS, don't do in-situ upgrades.
I already covered this earlier in the thread. For major macOS upgrades it is safer, better practice, and recommended by Avid that you do clean macOS installs and not in-situ upgrades. You should always have offline backups, and don't start an upgrade without having multiple separate backups, but do any major macOS upgrade by doing a clean macOS install on a new SSD and leaving your current system untouched means you are a reboot away from getting back to your current know running system.
But if you are not already making backups, ideally including bootable system drive backups/clones with something like carbon copy cloner then that is the very first place to start.
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To the OP: if there is no hard specific bug/problem you are trying to solve and you just want to be on a more recent macOS for general app compatibility etc. There is a lot to catch up with in new MacOS releases, and if the goal is to get to Arm systems then personally I'd either just wait on the OS you are on now and move straight to Arm, or live dangerously (like I am) and upgrade now to Big Sur and test carefully and maybe stay there if it works. Or wait a while until Big Sur is officially supported. I would not waste time doing multiple unnecessary macOS upgrades, again they should not seen as quick in-situ upgrades, they should be treated as a major thing to do... which I appreciate you are treating them as by asking here. But with you current production needs I'd honestly just stay where you are... and not upgrade anything, if you want to experiment and learn more and test recent stuff then I'd personally set up a second boot disk and play on that with say Pro Tools 2020.11 on Mojave or Big Sur. If you want advice on doing that just ask.
Also pay attention to details of the changes that have happened more recently, like loss of 32-bit applications support in recent macOS releases... if you are relying on old 32-bit apps/utilities then you won't want to upgrade to more recent releases, and won't be able to run those existing apps on an Arm based system. But an easy way of checking everything out a new clean test/learning install on a second boot drive.