Mac OS High Sierra available from 25/9

[memyselfandi]

Really need to look into how to revert from High Sierra to the previous release. It is the most god awful release I've had the misfortune to use in a long time. Slow, buggy and unstable are terms which spring to mind to describe it.

 

[Irish_Tom]

Really need to look into how to revert from High Sierra to the previous release. It is the most god awful release I've had the misfortune to use in a long time. Slow, buggy and unstable are terms which spring to mind to describe it.

Did you do a clean install or an upgrade?

I was having all sorts of issues but a clean install seems to have made it much better.

 

[ic1male]

Really need to look into how to revert from High Sierra to the previous release. It is the most god awful release I've had the misfortune to use in a long time. Slow, buggy and unstable are terms which spring to mind to describe it.

Are you using Fusion, SSD or HDD? Maybe you didn’t get the new filing system which is supposed to help speed things up. I’ve read a few examples where people bash on High Sierra but it seems to be a minority.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

My high Sierra experience has been seamless, both upgrading and clean installs.

 

[memyselfandi]

It was an upgrade and it's on a SSD. Performance just seems to be significantly worse both locally and over the network (and don't get me started on it not remembering the sort preferences on network shares, e.g. by date rather than name order)

 

[Silly Goose On The Loose]

I am having very odd WiFi issues on my MBP, seems to have happened since updating to High Sierra a while ago.

In essence, WiFi speeds are really slow. I can have my iPhone and Mac in the same spot, same WiFi network and my iPhone will be getting 50Mbps and yet my Mac is stuck on 10

 

[ic1male]

I know everybody says not to buy a Mac for gaming but I notice on Steam that more games than ever are now compatible with macOS. I’m tempted by the 2017 iMacs with Radeon 560 graphics.

My last experience with Macs was with Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard and it seemed that everytime Apple updated the OS it would break a lot of third party apps and games. Is that still the case with High Sierra? Or are the “games as a service”, i.e. the ones that developers are constantly updating like Overwatch, the only titles that’ll work reliably? Will old games of yesteryear like Half Life 2 or newer like Borderlands 2 all work? Or will it be a Boot Camp job, which kind of defeats the point of getting a Mac if I still have to use Windows 10. I also believe that all older games, if they do work, will be using very old OpenGL libraries so performance will be worse in macOS than Windows.

I suppose I should try installing Ubuntu on my PC to see how games run on that as it will be a rough comparison.

Additional - I also suppose that when Apple removes 32-bit support in the next macOS that will decimate the Mac games library?

 

[Feek]

All the games I've got on Steam (not many really) all work perfectly well. I still have Half Life and Half Life 2 on there and they work. The only games I really play though are Eve-Online where I log on and do a mission every couple of weeks and ETS2/ATS where I get around 45fps on my 2017 i7 iMac with the Radeon 580. In nearly ten years of Mac ownership I've not had any problems with third party apps/games not working after an OS update.

 

[ic1male]

That’s good to hear. It’ll mainly be older games that I’ll be playing (PS3-era ones that aren’t on PS4) so the iMac should be more than capable with those.

 

[ic1male]

Does anyone use the RAID 0 function of Disk Utility to mirror two external drives?

I can’t think of any other solution to back up an external drive. I’m not 100% au fait with Time Machine but is that more for backing up the internal system drive rather than duplicating an external?

 

[Feek]

RAID is not a backup.

If you have two external drives and you want to back on up to another, you could use something like SuperDuper! with it's scheduled copying. I have an external drive and at some time overnight, SuperDuper! fires up, mounts the external drive, clones my internal drive to it and then dismounts the external drive. I never see the external drive in Finder because I've added the UIID to /etc/fstab to stop it mounting on boot like this.

UUID=xxxxxxxxxx none hfs rw,noauto

xxxxxxxxxx is the UUID of the external drive I'm backing up to.

 

[ic1male]

Sorry, I’m getting my terminology muddled up. I meant RAID 1 which is mirror - copy one drive exactly to another. It’s more for redundancy than a backup. The data won’t be changing, just new files added. If one drive fails, I have a third which can be put into use to get the redundancy back.

I use this currently with Windows 10 storage spaces so it does what I need. I just wondered whether it was as seamless and reliable on High Sierra.

 

[ic1male]

@Feek OK, I'm going to scratch all that and use the info in your post. After reading an article on the differences between backup and redundancy, it appears that what I do need is a backup and not redundancy. As the external drive is only connected now and again, it doesn't need 24/7 online access so that throws redundancy out of the window. So it seems all I should do, is use Super Duper to back up the drive (hopefully it will do incremental backups just for the new stuff that has been added) before I disconnect the drives until I need them again.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

RAID 1 isn't backup in the sense that anything you do is instantly replicated to the other disk. So if you format the disk, delete or overwrite a file, that is instantly replicated to both disks. RAID gives you uptime, which on a home computer is a waste of effort and time and money, and makes your system more complex and more likely to fail (likely due to human error).

 

[ic1male]

Hmm, what I found using Storage Spaces in Windows though, is that it makes it seamless when I maybe move files/folders around or rename files. I'm not sure how that would be handled in a backup. Do the renamed files or moved folders still exist on the backup and are left there wasting space? How would Super Duper know that I've moved files around? Won't it just copy the entire folder again thinking it's something new?

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Yes, but that's exactly what you want from a backup. What if that move (or deletion) was accidental? Good backup software will allow you to control the age of various things (e.g. how long do I keep deleted files for, how long do I keep versions for). Apple's Time Machine is the perfect backup system, and it's a no-brainer to use. It keeps as many versions as it can until it runs out of space on the destination volume, and then it starts pruning the oldest versions.

Super Duper I believe allows you to have multiple snapshots of the drive, so each snapshot is essentially a point in time. If you got hit by ransomware, you would roll back to yesterday's snapshot and you're back in business. A combination of Time Machine and Super Duper gives you the granularity (Time Machine backs up every 15 minutes from memory) and the belt and braces (Super Duper allows you to quickly and easily restore the entire drive in case of total catastrophe).

However, don't forget cloud backups. What happens if you're burgled or your house burns down?

 

[Feek]

10.13.3 is out, no Combo yet though.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

10.13.3 is out, no Combo yet though.

What is combo? Is that where you can create a bootable USB to do a clean install?

 

[ic1male]

What is combo? Is that where you can create a bootable USB to do a clean install?

It’s the update that includes all changes from 10.13.0 instead of 10.13.2. I think.

 

[Feek]

What is combo? Is that where you can create a bootable USB to do a clean install?

It’s the update that includes all changes from 10.13.0 instead of 10.13.2. I think.

Correct, I always use the Combo update.