I have some downtime and was thinking of upgrading my main work laptop from Big Sur to Monterey now that Monterey 12.1 is out and presumably a little more stable.
You didn’t mention if your laptop running Big Sur was Intel or M1 based, but I’ll assume Intel based since you mention VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop.
But be aware you may have to upgrade XCode if running say XCode 12.5.1 or whatever. Monterey cannot run anything below XCode 13 (to my knowledge). At least that is true on my M1 machines. I don’t have an Intel machine on Monterey; just older macOS releases.
Meanwhile my wife, who’s still running 10.9 Mavericks now has an uptime of years. Meanwhile I’ve struggled to keep Macs running more than a month since 10.13. Kernel Panics, weird ■■■■ that only goes away with a restart. Flaky peripheral support, Rogue Apple processes chewing through CPU and now Apple processes leaking memory.
A new one I found yesterday was the inability to delete certain files from the Terminal even with sudo. Yet I can drag them to the Trash with the Finder…
Mind that you need the latest beta of Superduper in order to have a chance creating a bootable image. I temporary moved to CCC, which is ok but doesn’t deliver a bootable disk either.
Of course, if you never write into your HDD… and fire an application that needs 1MB of Free Memory (never more than that), I do not see any need for a reboot (but I am quite sure there are some needs).
But, when you write hundred of small (or not) files each and everyday of the year (and deleting some every days), run muyltiple application (until Virtual Memory runs ON), etc., you will very fast need a reboot:
some application features start to … stop working,
copy / paste start to be difficult (and|or slow),
the whole computer is slow as a snail…
you’re starting to complain?.
Reboot as fast as you can !
Now, if you are looking to beat the longest boot time record (longest session without reboot) … to be in the Guiness Book of Records…
Seems to be an Apple “feature”…
Due to SIP Apple does prevent access to some files even for “root” user. I had this e.g. after a system update where old left over files could not removed.
You need to reboot into recovery mode, disable SIP, reboot and delete the files. Now you can re-enable SIP with another recovery boot.
Don’t know how you are working, but those two MacMinis are used as database servers (FileMaker and VServer), controlled via RemoteDesktop, some local applications are used. RAM is sometimes swapped as Java is a little bit greedy…
CCC does offer the creation of a bootable disk, as a legacy feature. Because of the nature of the Sealed System Volume on Big Sur+, it requires initializing the backup disk before starting. Thereafter, normal backups only address the Data volume.
Thanks for all the feedback. It sounds like 12.1 vs 11.6 is “not necessarily better nor worse” and I may go ahead and give it a try.
Re: SuperDuper - I tried to make a bootable encrypted backup following the instructions (which require you to boot into the unencrypted backup and enable fileVault) but the boot never finished. I gave up and just decided to backup the user data only on an encrypted APFS drive, which works fine.
(somewhat related) if you are using TimeMachine, one should note that under BigSur, TimeMachine seems much happier (faster) if you reformat your backup drive to APFS.
Was the file actualy a file, or perhaps a hard or soft link? Also, note that folder names can be localized - for example in the finder, the name of my VMWare Fusion folder is
~/Documents/Virtual Machines
but in terminal it’s
~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized
