Big Sur - clean rental - Migration Assistant useless - HELP!!!
Hi all,
So, after going months with Big Sur "update" on my MacBookPro 15" late-2018 model I decided with all of the problems, the sluggishness, the very crappy response and countless issues with software not playing happy with the OS - the list is long... see below... I decided to do a fresh, clean, wipe and install.
My thinking was - maybe the "update" to Big Sur from Catalina was not the best scenario. In fact, I think from now on I will NEVER upgrade to a completely new OS by "updating". I will do a completely fresh install. Only if I can figure out what went wrong...
What a complete nightmare.
I thought Apple had gotten this to a point where it was flawless. Maybe 2-3 systems ago? Where did this reliability go? Big Sur - IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST.
Will try to recount it here in the hopes someone might be able to shed some light on what I could do differently. I'm at the point a complete wipe and reinstall is favourably to hobbling along as it would be now. It is just not acceptable.
- I backed everything up. Backed up my person stuff on one pocket drive, all work on another. I am meticulous about such backups, I've done it countless times, for myself, friends, clients, etc.
- I manually copied the Mail directory, just in case I would have to manually set this up for one reason or another - already anticipating things won't go smoothly - 6 different email accounts and dozens of subfolders to keep things organized
- Deleted a lot of bulk and did a further TimeMachine backup - freed up a further 80GB - checked it was available as of 11pm last night, checked further backups were available - but knew I had a trimmed-down backup - the latest
- Restarted with Command+R and got into the Disk Utility app to wipe
Here's where things started to go "off the rails"
So, a new thing about Big Sur, I believe, as I had not encountered this with previous OSs but not sure had done so in 10.9 or 10.10... In Disk Utility after a Command+R reboot I am now presented with TWO HARD DRIVE PARTITIONS:
**Macintosh HD** and **Macintosh HD - Data**
I SHOULD HAVE STOPPED THERE!! Can I use TimeMachine to go back to 11pm last night and slap myself in the face? No.
So, I look this up and from what I was able to see, Macintosh HD is the boot drive - contains the necessary system for recovery... cannot be erased - makes sense. But Macintosh HD - Data can be erased. I was already having the sneaking suspicion this wasn't going to go where I wanted it to go - and was right.
Now, oddly enough, the complete reinstall of Big Sur took barely 30 minutes. THAT - I was impressed. I started it at midnight thinking I'd go to bed and after the usually 2-3 hours it would do what it needed to do. It was done in 30 minutes. That's impressive. If only it had done what I wanted.
I then immediately go through the new setup and get to the account recovery to retrieve my old user account to migrate it.
Cannot find my remote backup drive. I am using a Drobo. Thankfully I have a desktop iMac and I look up the network info and type in the IP - xx.0.0.xxx. No go.
So here I am now thinking, yeah, this is not going well, this is now a full day of rebuilding ahead.
Then I think, ok, just set up a new user account and then mount the Drobo and then start the Migration Assistant. That sounds perfectly logical. And true to form - with my experience with the Mac OS since the Catalina disasters... this does not work. I have the Drobo partition I use for the TimeMachine backups sitting there on my desktop and Migration Assistant just sits there "Looking up... whatever..." spinning and doing nothing. I type in the IP again. Nothing.
MacBook Pro with Touch Bar