[Software] macOS Big' Sur upgrade. reportedly causing’ data, loss if low on drive space’

[-Lexman™]

Mac owners who are upgrading to macOS Big Sur should be very careful if they are running low on drive space, as in this case, the process could reportedly lead to data loss.

The issue here is that an initial upgrade to Big Sur requires a minimum of 35.5GB to be available on the drive, plus 13GB for the macOS Big Sur installer itself (making 48.5GB in total). If you don’t have that much space, then things can go badly wrong, as reported by Mr Macintosh.

 

 

• Apple sold a ton of Macs last year
• All the best Macs to buy
• Check out all the best laptops around

 

The problem is that apparently macOS doesn’t check if you have that amount of drive space before starting the installation process, and when the installer subsequently runs out of room, some folks are reporting getting an “error occurred preparing the software update” message.

The Mac then becomes stuck in the Boot Recovery Assistant environment, with no way to recover. Well, no easy or obvious way to recover, anyway, leaving the data on the disk in danger of being lost – more on that in a moment.

 

 

 

Sticky situation

The possible recovery procedure depends on the exact scenario you’re in, as explained in the blog post by Mr Macintosh, but if you have FileVault encryption enabled on your system, things can get very sticky.

 

Indeed, in the latter case, the only way to go about righting your system and recovering your data is by using a second Mac (running macOS High Sierra or Mojave) and hooking the two machines up. So, many folks will be in trouble there, as it isn’t exactly common to have more than one Mac (or easy to borrow one, if you don’t).