Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

peterburkimsher

I used the Catalina point-release updaters on Tuesday!

I needed to run Migration Assistant to copy files from a Mac Mini with 10.15.7 to another Mac Mini, originally with 10.11.

Time Machine couldn't restore. The APFS drive wouldn't mount. Carbon Copy Cloner couldn't clone the drive either. I started to dd, but realised it wouldn't update the BootROM. I made a Catalina installer with createinstallmedia, to install 10.15.

Migration Assistant still failed to copy over the keychain, because I'd installed 10.15.3 or something on the destination, instead of 10.15.7 (the source Mac Mini). Most files worked, but without the keychain, many passwords and software licence keys weren't available.

I needed the standalone updaters to make both computer run 10.15.7, so I could run Migration Assistant and get the files over (finally!)

It would be a big problem if Apple stop making these available.

Honest question: how's that different from running Software Update from the 10.15.3 install to get to 10.15.7? (Other than working offline once you have the update downloaded, that is.)

Working offline is actually quite important. The download size is over 4 GB for the combo updater, even just for a point release. In this case, the Internet connection was fast enough, but in many places in the world it would take hours longer to download that (10 MBps at my parents' house, 250 KBps in Kiribati where I travelled last year).

It's also good to not need to connect to the App Store, with all the 2FA involved. That would associate my Apple account with that computer, and save my password in the keychain. (Yes, I know I can delete it, but I want to leave the migration running overnight and just tell the user to reboot when it's done).

I have had low bandwidth for most of my life and apple update has been a pain for the huge size of even point update. I actually haven't used offline download.

My biggest pain point was that the downloader portion of the updater is so low quality. It corrupts downloads or restarts with tiny network blips, can't resume most of the time and often much slower to download than available bandwidth (that might a bad routing issue on my country). Overall it's often a painful experience.

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