Big Sur / big bad upgrade experience.

[Beardy]

Hi Mac gang,

I just wanted to let you know that upgrading my production laptop to Big Sur last week was so disastrous that I was forced to delete my system drive and copy my Catalina cloned backup back onto the laptop. I'm sure there are lots of people out there who've had a smooth ride but in case you're on the fence I just wanted to let you know about my recent experience.

I'm always a year behind the upgrade cycle based on the theory that most 3rd party developers have caught up by the time the next OS is about to release. It's worked seamlessly over the years but not this time.

I checked all the plugin manufacturers and everything seemed like it would be ok. The first recent Logic project I opened loaded and played ok but Logic would freeze every couple of minutes for about 30 seconds. Unusable.

The second project I opened struggled to even play a bar or two before grinding to a standstill.

The past year has seen lots of warnings from our community about Big Sur but I'd seen enough positive reports of late to convince me the time was right. So in case any of you put there are thinking about upgrading too I wanted to let you know that I ran into a lot of trouble.

Back on Catalina 15.7 now and all is fine.

One anomaly is that on Catalina my battery needs requires an urgent service - days of downtime in Australia whilst the local repair shop get parts etc. But on Big Sur the battery was seemingly fine. What's that about?

I'm using a 2018 15" MacBook Pro 2.6 i7 / 32GB RAM / 2TB SSD

Forever grateful for a regular backup routine!

Cheers!

[S2]

That sounds a nightmare. I can sympathise since when I upgraded from Mavericks to Catalina on my iMac 21" (knowing very little about Mac stuff and hadn't backed up to Time Machine) I lost vast amounts of software including Microsoft Office as it went from 32 bit to 64 bit. I didn't read up about it, just pressed the button!

You sound like you did a lot more research and still suffered!

FWIW I have just bought one of these new MacBook Air M1's with Big Sur on it and I've had no problems at all installing and running Logic on it or any of the (few) plugins I have. Doesn't help you much I'm afraid other than Logic does work under big Sur.

[Chromeman]

To the OP, as a matter of interest, how did you perform the update? Did you update the OS with the data in place or did you back up your data first, do a fresh install of Big Sur, then copy the data back?

[Beardy]

Hey Chromeman I updated with the data in place.

[adamburgess]

My 2012 MBP finally died a second death last year so I jumped on the cheapest M1 Mac mini. I set stuff up from scratch and one the first day I was utterly disappointed when loading a large Logic project, mainly MIDI (VIs/external modules etc). DIdn't seem like it would handle anywhere near what the old laptop was doing… hanging, system overloads, slow playback start/stop…

I went to the pub for a while to think about what I'd done, came back few hours later and all was well. Don't know if it was indexing the drives, or what. But, it can do so much more now.

Hardware was an X32 and a couple of iConnectivity interfaces. No problems as yet (discounting the iConnectivity software which I still despise!)

Since a few gigs are coming back, I just treated myself to the cheapest MacBook Air. Migrated everything from the Mac mini over, can use the same external library/project drives and it's been solid since day one.

Adam (not all bad in Big Sur land)

[Beardy]

Nice one Adam. Thanks for sharing the positive experience. I will have another go at it in the future and maybe as Chromeman mentioned, I'll do a clean install.

Does anyone know if it's an automated process to clean install and then copy all the data across in one go? Or is it a manual job? Which could get time consuming!

Cheers.

[adamburgess]

I did the first one manually from scratch.

Second time I trusted the Migration Assistant. Took about 30mins and I had two IDENTICAL machines!

[Twangothan]

Sympathies and empathy. I've been putting off upgrading from High Sierra to Catalina but had to do it eventually and tooko the jump today. I have a late 2012 Mac Mini which is a nice little machine which I only use for music. I spent hours trying to get everything working - I think I'm almost there though plugs still pop up as unapproved developers etc. Currently my backup drive isnt recognised and Wavelab is being awkward but the end is in sight. I swear I'll never upgrade it again and the next platform will not be an Apple.