Reverting back to Catalina? Time Machine?

[AJP24]

I need to re-install my HP 8610 printer but it has no driver that supports Big Sur. I only updated two days ago but want to revert back. To do this, I would need to:

A) Back up my files on an external drive.

B) Wipe my computer.

C) ???

I believe I could do a complete Time Machine restore, BUT, there's part of me that only wants to pull the files and programs I want from Time Machine, because I think I'm having a background script issue affecting mice bluetooth connectivity so having a fresh install wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing... Can I do this?

Help me out here?

 

[Rod]

I think I would say that if your HP printer is your main issue I would try to fix that rather than take the very complicated path of reverting to an earlier macOS from Big Sur.
You also mention a mouse problem, again I think a "clean" instal is a drastic step to take to fix a background script issue, if indeed that is the cause.

I should add restoring specific files to a "clean" instal is not so easy from Time Machine and if you were to perform a clean instal you might be better advised to perform a clean instal of Big Sur rather than going back to Catalina unless you still have the Instal Mac OS Catalina App because it will no longer be available on the App Store by the usual methods.

To do what I proposed above you would need to have a Clone of your present Mac on preferably an SSD external HD.
Download the Mac OS Big Sur Installer again, unless you kept it.
Create a Bootable USB Mac OS Big Sur Installer on a portable media device (eg.thumb drive) using Terminal.
Boot from that and erase your internal HD.
Install the fresh copy of Big Sur.
Lastly drag an drop your data and files from the clone to your clean instal of Big Sur or use Migration Assistant.

As you can see it's not for the faint hearted. Some people have successfully used Internet Recovery for part of this process but I have no experience doing a Erase, Format and Map plus instal of an operating system on a HD this way and you would still need to store/save your data first and later migrate it back.

Suffice to say there are potential problems and variations with each of the steps I described above but at the end of the day so long as you have a complete backup of all of you data you can always recover. Sadly at this moment it is not possible to make a Bootable Clone of Big Sur first which would have been the safest option but due to issues with the Big Sur OS itself developers are still working on a way to make this possible.

 

[AJP24]

I think I would say that if your HP printer is your main issue I would try to fix that rather than take the very complicated path of reverting to an earlier macOS from Big Sur.
You also mention a mouse problem, again I think a "clean" instal is a drastic step to take to fix a background script issue, if indeed that is the cause.

I should add restoring specific files to a "clean" instal is not so easy from Time Machine and if you were to perform a clean instal you might be better advised to perform a clean instal of Big Sur rather than going back to Catalina unless you still have the Instal Mac OS Catalina App because it will no longer be available on the App Store by the usual methods.

To do what I proposed above you would need to have a Clone of your present Mac on preferably an SSD external HD.
Download the Mac OS Big Sur Installer again, unless you kept it.
Create a Bootable USB Mac OS Big Sur Installer on a portable media device (eg.thumb drive) using Terminal.
Boot from that and erase your internal HD.
Install the fresh copy of Big Sur.
Lastly drag an drop your data and files from the clone to your clean instal of Big Sur or use Migration Assistant.

As you can see it's not for the faint hearted. Some people have successfully used Internet Recovery for part of this process but I have no experience doing a Erase, Format and Map plus instal of an operating system on a HD this way and you would still need to store/save your data first and later migrate it back.

Suffice to say there are potential problems and variations with each of the steps I described above but at the end of the day so long as you have a complete backup of all of you data you can always recover. Sadly at this moment it is not possible to make a Bootable Clone of Big Sur first which would have been the safest option but due to issues with the Big Sur OS itself developers are still working on a way to make this possible.

Thank you for the info. Didn’t realize it was so complicated so I won’t be taking that route. I will post tomorrow about my printer issue and my mouse issue in the hopes that someone can assist me.

 

[Rod]

Please do, you can continue on in this same thread.

 

[MacInWin]

I posed in your other thread on the topic. Maybe a MOD will merge the two?

 

[chscag]

I posed in your other thread on the topic. Maybe a MOD will merge the two?

Still trying to figure out how to merge two threads without screwing them up. Easy with the old software, but with the new software, it's more complicated. For now we'll leave it as two separate threads.

I can merge his two threads but it's the replies that seem to get lost when doing it. We'll figure it out later.

 

[AJP24]

Rod, you can delete this thread if you like.