MacOS Catalina 'Verifying Files'

The Apple support tech did not suggest that I turn off SIP. I got that idea from a previous post in this discussion. What bothered me was that the original install of Catalina destroyed my recovery partition and did not let me know until I actually had to use it.

Thanks for the update Michael. This isn't exclusively a MS problem though they might be able to help track down the bug. I have the same problem with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. I have also been having problems with Safari bogging down the system when it's not giving me connection problems to some news services.

My plan forward is to eschew SIP override in favor of shutting down my system at night and starting up my Apps after boot and taking a shower while it re-verifies the apps I plan to use for the day.

Acrobat Pro (I think I had X or XI, something like that) just quit working altogether. Adobe says they're not doing anything to fix Acrobat Pro X/XI, and that the only suggestion is to buy ($500) or rent what you have. I did not know DC was also a problem, as I opted instead for PDF Studio Pro, which seems does most of what I could do with Acrobat Pro and costs a lot less. Check it out on a trial basis. Safari has just seemed to get slower and slower over the years and updates. I use Chrome a lot because it seems to work better.

I’m be been using a Mac since 1998 and for the first time ever I’ve had to roll back to the previous OS - in this case Mojave. Perhaps if I was a new adopter with nothing but the latest apps bought from the App Store and brand new files then maybe the constant verifying wouldn’t be happening but it was just beyond tolerable and throttling my MacBook Pro. Every app was constantly stalling to verify including the very latest up to date versions of Apples own apps such as Numbers, Pages, Mail, Logic to Microsoft office and more. Nothing would fix it so I used my time machine back up to roll back to Mojave and everything is fine again. So disappointed with this and also perplexed that the media have given Catalina such an easy ride. They must obviously just be using a brand new machine with no legacy files or apps. Apple have designed an operating system with zero thought for the loyal Mac customers who have been with them for years. I’ll happily use Catalina in the future on a new machine but will keep my MacBook Pro with old files on Mojave and will not update it just in case.

Same here exactly. And it was a bit more painful than I anticipated reverting back to Mojave, as the restore from Time Machine didn’t go smoothly the first time, I ended up needing to do a clean wipe and install a fresh copy of high Sierra

, then upgrade it to Mojave, then connect to time machine capsule, rename the file extension back to .sparsebackup since Catalina changes it for some reason..... Then use Migration assistant to bring back all my data, then reinstall all my apps, Etc. A couple days of arduous work to undo the Catalina disaster.

i agree with you that Catalina wil probably work fine on a new machine, and maybe if I had done a clean wipe and install of Catalina on my current laptop and brought my data in through migration assistant, maybe it would have been fine as well. Wasted too much time though and definitely not willing to waste the time now.

By the time I get my next new machine, I’m sure we’ll have seen some major updates and the OS will be more stable and life will be good again, even Microsoft recovered from Vista eventually......

One of the techs suggested I go to Pages and Numbers as a possible solution, even if temporarily while awaiting an MS/Apple solution. The reviews of Pages are not that great, and I would not switch from Word at all, were it not for the Catalina problem. I'm not going to opt for a solution of marginal benefit to solve a huge problem; it's probably not a good idea.

The techs are not addressing the actual problem. It’s NOT a microsoft office issue as thousands of users are having the same problem with apples own up to date apps. The fact that they fail

to acknowledge the real issue is what’s so bad. Wouldn’t have happened or Steve Job’s Watch.

Sorry to add a "me too" here but... me too, can't run Xcode without it reverifying after a build, before running the sim - Catalina is completely broken.

Suggestion for Apple - don't break MacOS nor iOS each and every summer, don't expect beta users to identify every major bug. Really poor QA from Apple.

We should have been offered the opportunity to be guinea pigs. Instead, that role was shoved down our throats (a benign way to express the sentiment) with a long series of "it's coming soon; be sure your apps are ready for 64 bits..." Etc. I dutifully checked ALL apps to ensure that their designers had kept up and that I had installed updates to keep pace. Then when the new system came out I followed the rest of the lemmings (sorry for mammal metaphors) over the cliff. This should be getting a lot wider play online than seems to be the case. I see nothing particularly condemnatory about commentaries to date. This has been a disaster, way more than Apple has admitted.

I'm still waiting for news on my pending Apple "case," having been told that data downloaded from my computer by Apple was being analyzed and that Apple and Microsoft were supposedly working together on the Office apps. Adobe Acrobat quit altogether, and I've switched to another program - PDF Studio, a lot cheaper, and nimble enough for now.

I completely agree. Catalina has for the first time made me consider switching to Windows as my main OS. While Windows has it's own perks and problems, I haven't encountered anything near as egregious as Catalina's broken security system.

On my work computer, apps will spontaneously lose access to my Desktop and Documents folders and require a system restart every time to fix it before it breaks again. I highly suspect that problem is related to the new privacy permissions added in Catalina.

While I understand the reasoning behind these new security features, there is also a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," or at the very least when adding these ambitious changes to an already mature OS, making sure it's thoroughly tested before it's released to the public.

The end user are not your beta testers. While we can put up with the occasional odd bugs, I'm increasingly getting the perception that Apple just releases software in an unfinished state now because they don't have to resources to fix major issues before release.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/11/21/apple-shifts-ios-14-development-strategy-to-cut-buggy-releases

Apparently Apple is changing its development procedure to cut buggy iOS and MacOS releases in future

Thanks for sharing that article. However, all I can see in that article is the iOS development team is refining its procedures. No reference is made to the MacOS team, which i a completely different group. One can only hope though that they get enough feedback of this widespread disaster, and figure out what they did wrong and not make that mistake again!

I also submitted an issue to apple, using "feedbackassistant.apple.com". I shared my own experiences as well as directing them to this thread, and explicitly copying and pasting the notes that hirokzu detailed above. Hopefully that helps the effort.

Curiously, following the procedure to disable sip made no difference for me... however, when I was already starting down the path of reverting to Mojave and I had booted back up in recovery mode, I checked and it seemed like sip was not disabled. So perhaps disabling didn’t take for some reason for me... or that it somehow got re-enabled after the process.

Yeah, maybe a permissions issue? I followed the instructions in the "answer" in this thread - reboot, command-R immediately, wait for ages until the system boots into recovery mode, select terminal from the top menu, check if SIP is currently enabled ("csrutil status") and if it is (it was for me) disable it ("csrutil disable"), then reboot from the Apple menu. I could be wrong but most of the "me too" comments in this thread are from laptop users, correct? My iMac Pro upgraded to Catalina with zero issues and runs perfectly now.