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So Apple has shipped the next major operating system, and you're excited to upgrade! But are you ready? OS upgrades offer the thrill of new features, better performance and bug fixes, but they can come at a price — your time and potentially your productivity. If you upgrade your OS only to discover that a critical third-party application or peripheral doesn't work right, you could be really lost when you discover that it's impossible to downgrade to a previous OS. Unless, that is, you have a complete, bootable backup of your Mac made before you upgrade. Make your bootable backup before upgrading • Get a backup disk.

If you need advice, we offer some. • and fire it up. • Choose your startup disk in the Source selector. • Choose your backup volume in the Destination selector.

• Click the Clone button. •: Select the backup disk as the startup disk in the Startup Disk Preference Pane in the System Preferences application, then restart.

• Choose About This Mac from the Apple menu to verify that your Mac booted from the backup disk. • Reset the startup disk selection in the System Preferences application to your production startup disk and restart.

• Detach your backup disk from your Mac and set it aside. Until you are ready to commit to the newer OS, you don't want the backup disk to be upgraded automatically by a scheduled backup task. The macOS Installer may delete snapshots from the volume that you're upgrading If you're running High Sierra when making this backup, you may have noticed that. After upgrading your startup disk to macOS Mojave, however, you may find that all of the snapshots on the startup disk have been removed. We don't know Apple's reasoning behind this choice (nor do we know whether there are cases where snapshots might not be deleted), but it is important to know that this can happen. The snapshots on any APFS-formatted destination volumes will not be affected, and of course you can always restore from your current CCC bootable backup whether it's formatted APFS or HFS+.

Upgrade to the new OS Download the newest OS from the Mac App Store and apply the upgrade. Make sure everything is working. Take some time to run the applications that are most important to you. If, after a week or so you decide that everything is copacetic and you are ready to commit to the new operating system, attach your backup disk to your Mac, open CCC and re-run your backup task with the same settings — CCC will update your backup volume with only the items that have changed since your last backup. This is an important step — once the backup task has completed, the operating system on your backup disk will match the source, and you will no longer be able to use the backup to downgrade to the previous OS. If you have to downgrade, here's what you need to do [This video is applicable to Mojave downgrades as well] Keep in mind that when you open an Apple application on the newer OS (e.g.

Mail, Contacts, Calendar, etc.), those applications will immediately and irreversibly upgrade the user data for those applications. You cannot simply reinstall High Sierra (for example), then go about your day with the upgraded user data; the Mojave versions of those Apple applications can't use the upgraded data. If you need to downgrade to a previous OS, it is imperative that you have a complete, bootable backup of your Mac as it was prior to the upgrade. To effectively restore everything back to a previous version of the OS, do the following: • Open CCC and that are scheduled to back up to your backup disk. • Attach your CCC backup disk to your Mac. • Open the Startup Disk preference pane in the System Preferences application.

• Choose your backup volume as the startup disk, then click on the Restart button. • Open Disk Utility • Unmount the original (upgraded) startup disk • Select the whole disk device that contains your original startup disk. This step is very important. See for clarity. • Click the Erase button in Disk Utility's toolbar • If you're downgrading to an OS older then High Sierra or you're restoring to a Fusion device, use the OS X Extended, Journaled format.