Internet Recovery?

Good morning everyone, I would like to revert back from El Capitan to Yosemite as I am not happy with El Capitan. I have seen references to "Internet Recovery" and wonder if it is simple enough for me to do at home. I have a Mac Mini late 2012, model A1347 purchased July 2014. It has a 500gb hard drive and 8gb RAM, I do not have a Time Machine back up but do have a loaded copy of Super Duper which I run on first of every month. One of my questions is - if I can do the job at home will my photographs, currently in Photo, be deleted? Secondly if they are deleted is it a case of just drag and drop the whole Photo file into Yosemite. Pardon me if I talk rubbish here as I am not computer literate at all.
Very best regards from Keith in Derby England.

After further research I wonder if the "Recovery mode" is more suited to my problem? Keith in Derby England.

Hi Keith

I'll answer your question in part then perhaps take the detail further.

Command plus R takes you into Recovery from which you can re-download the OS which is currently on your Mac.

Command plus Option plus R takes you into Internet Recovery and that is the route by which you can download the OS with which the Mac shipped.

The two "Recoveries" are therefore quite different.

The former re- installs the same OS as you currently have on top of your OS and shouldn't affect your data.

Installing the OS that shipped with your Mac is very different and could affect your data and apps and the way they work.

In either case, a current backup is strongly advised.

That's the background; now to some added detail. Why do you want to downgrade to an inferior OS that will relatively soon be no longer supported by Apple?

Can we not help you with those problems you are having?

If you are determined to change your OS then not only do you need an up to date backup, but you would probably be advised to do a clean install and use Migration Assistant to move over your stuff.

Please post back before doing anything drastic.

Ian

Yosemite may not be available to you unless you had downloaded it before. Internet Recovery will take your Mini back to its original installation of OS X that came with it. Do you remember which version of OS X came with your Mini? Mactracker says it may have been Mavericks. Also, internet recovery is very slow especially if your connection is not a fast one.

Going backward is not always a good idea as it can lead to other problems. What is it about El Capitan that you don't like? And have you considered going forward instead and upgrading to Sierra?

Hi IWT and chscag, thank you both for your reply. I suppose the main reason for my desire to return to Yosemite is that over the past couple of months I have been getting lots of the dreaded "spinning beach balls", I have looked at my operating system with Malwarebytes on an almost daily basis and nothing has been found. I have turned my Virgin Media router off and back on again about five times, I have checked my download speed (110Mb/s) and an upload speed of 7.34Mb/s. They have remained fairly steady since I started checking them, so I do not really place any blame on the router or the supplier. I am not really up to speed on either aPC or an Apple Mac even though I have had a PC for a number of years, I think Apple wipe the floor with the PC as they are so superior. Now chscag, I had not thought of upgrading to Sierra and you have perhaps pointed me in the right direction! I have not researched Sierra at all but used Yosemite for quite a while and I use that fact as my argument because I had no trouble with it at all. In fact have not been happy with El Capitan really since I downloaded it. The reason I did not go back to Yosemite is I have not got a clue as to how to do that. I will do some reading on Sierra and look quite seriously at it. Thank you both very much indeed from Keith in Derby England.

Hi Keith - you've already received great advice from Ian and Chscag - I'd agree to go to Sierra; your Mac Mini late 2012 w/ 8 GB RAM certainly meets the hardware requirements. But first tell us if you are running any AV software and/or 'cleaning maintenance apps' (such as Clean My Mac) - if so, might help to explain your 'beach ball' comments? Dave

Hi RadDave, the only software of the calibre is "disc care" and "malwarebytes", the malwarebytes has been on since they announced that they now support Apple OS. So I do not think there is any conflict there?
Thank you for your interest from Keith in Derby.

What are you actually referring to as 'disc care'? Not Mackeeper nor CleanMyMac and similar I trust?

If it is software Disk Care for recovering space on your hard drive, no need for it as OS X does that. Interestingly in a year it has gone from five to thirty one bucks so the developers think it is a good thing.

Good morning all, thank you harryb2448 for your reply regarding disc care. I was not aware it could be dangerous in my Mac Mini, when I finish this reply I will delete it. Still reading about OS Sierra which seems to be getting a lot of very mixed reactions, some good but a lot of bad ones as well. Having said that I feel I will very shortly be upgrading to OS Sierra. I thank all four of you for replying to my query and helping me to reach a sensible solution to a very simple problem. Once again many thanks and very best regards from Keith in Derby England.