I had El Capitan and installed Catalina and lost InDesign CS6. Can I install High Sierra or do i restore El Capitan
I had El Capitan and installed Catalina and lost InDesign CS6. Can I install High Sierra or do i restore El Capitan
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Did you make a full backup of your mac before you upgraded to Catalina,
if so you can probably use that backup to restore your mac to El Capitan.
You would need to erase the internal drive and then reformat it back to
MacOS Extended (Journaled).
If you did not make a full backup before you upgraded to Catalina
you are in for a long frustrating time.
To downgrade from Catalina to either High Sierra or El Capitan would require you to
download a copy of the full installer for whichever OS you want to downgrade to.
How to get old versions of macOS – Apple Support
Then make a bootable USB installer using the full installer app you downloaded and
the createinstallmedia command in Terminal.
How to create a bootable installer for macOS – Apple Support
Then you would need to make a full backup of your mac.
Then you need to erase your Disk using Disk Utility from the bootable installer,
formatting for APFS for High Sierra or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from El Capitan.
Having done that you would reinstall the OS from the bootable USB.
After that you would restore only your personal data from the back up you made
earlier. Do not restore any System or Library files that will put Catalina back on
your mac. Do not restore any apps from the backup either, that would restore
Catalina versions of the apps which will not work on the OS you decided to install.
You may also find that any files you created or edited in Catalina will not be backwards
compatible with the versions of the apps that work on the OS you installed.
Your Photoslibrary on the backup will have been updated for Catalina and will not
work on the downgraded OS. You would have needed to export your images
from Photos to a folder before backing up. When downgraded you can import that folder
into the version of Photos on the downgraded OS. You will probably lose all settings,
keywords, GPS settings etc.
