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Comment by valleyer | Hacker News Reader

But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only. This isn't a problem if you are willing to e.g. re-download all of your (Mail.app) mail.

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> But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only.

One huge reason to use third-party programs where possible. I dislike Apple's tight coupling of utilities as it is.

Yep, that's a great workaround, as long as you have third-party apps you're happy with.

Yep, though you can mitigate it a little bit in various ways. For one weird example, I keep my main user Home folder on my NAS and mount it via iSCSI. Mostly that's for data integrity/size/backup purposes, but it does also make it free to snapshot before trying out a system upgrade. If I hate it I can rollback my entire set of user data along with the OS.

Though amongst many other wonderful things lost in the mysts of Mac history I still desperately miss NetBoot/NetInstall and ultra easy clone/boot with something like CCC and TDM. It's so fucking miserable now in comparison to do reinstalls/testing/restores.

@xoa may I ask what do you use as iSCSI initiator?

Sorry for missing this! I use Xtend SAN by ATTO [0], which has been around a long time but is still getting basic updates including native Apple Silicon support now, and seems to perform well. It uses a kext and I do worry the day may come that Apple kills support despite having nothing ready to go for equivalent functionality, but so far so good.

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0: https://www.atto.com/products/xtend-san-iscsi-initiator/

I generally just “reload” everything.

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