From the course: macOS Big Sur Essential Training

Upgrade to macOS Big Sur - macOS Tutorial

From the course: macOS Big Sur Essential Training

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Upgrade to macOS Big Sur

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- [Instructor] In this video, I want to talk about what it takes to upgrade to macOS Big Sur from a previous version of macOS. It's important to make sure your files are backed up before running a major upgrade like this. It is rare, but there's a slim chance that something could happen that could affect your files. Next, you should take a look at this webpage and scroll down a bit to confirm that your computer can run macOS Big Sur. So check this list of compatible computers and if you don't know which Mac you have, you can go to the system menu by clicking on the Apple logo in the top left corner, go to About This Mac, and you can see which computer you have and you can check that against this list. Also, you can see which version of macOS you're currently running. I'm running version 10.15, which is macOS Catalina. Okay, so I'm going to close all this and to start the upgrade, you can go to System Preferences. So we'll go back to that system menu to System Preferences. Then I'll click on Software Update. And you may see the upgrade to Big Sur already available here. And you can start the upgrade from there. Now, if you do not see it here, you can also check the App Store. So we can do that by going to the system menu again, then open up the App Store. And by the time you're watching this video, Big Sur will probably be featured on this front page. Or you can just do a search. So I'll go to the search field here. I'll search for Big Sur. I'll need to scroll through the search results here, and there it is. I can click on that and see information about it. And if you are signed into the App Store, you can just click this Get button to start the installation. And when you do that, it'll just jump you over to System Preferences anyway. So I'll close that App Store window. When it asks if you want to download the upgrade, just confirm that right here. So now it will download the installer. And this will take some time, so let's skip ahead. When the download is finished, you'll see a window like this. When you're ready, just click Continue and agree to the licensing terms. And I'll agree here as well. Now, at this point, if you're upgrading from an older version of macOS before Catalina, you might get a warning letting you know that some of your applications won't work with Big Sur and it will tell you which applications won't work. If that's a problem, you can cancel the installation. Now it's going to confirm that it will install the upgrade on my main system drive and that's fine. If you have multiple drives on your computer with bootable installs of macOS, then you should choose the drive that you want to install the upgrade on. So I'll just make sure the right drive is selected, I only have one available, then I'll click continue. I'll need to put in the administrator password for this computer and click OK here and the installation process starts. Now, the time estimate we see on the screen here is only for the first part. In a few minutes, the computer will restart, then continue with the installation, and that will take even more time. So let's skip forward again. When the installation process is done, just sign into your account as normal. Then you will see a few setup screens. Now, if you get this question about iCloud Drive and if you don't know what this means, I recommend you turn this option off because it affects the default location where files are stored. To learn more about this option, I recommend you watch the iCloud Essential Training Course, then go through the rest of the setup. And now the installation is all finished. Now, if you want to confirm that Big Sur has been installed, you can go back to that main System menu, go to About This Mac, where I can see I'm now on macOS Big Sur, which is macOS 11. So now I'm all done with the upgrade.

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