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Upgrade to El Capitan on a remote Mac mini | Macminicolo Blog - Tips, tutorials and reviews on running a Mac mini server

Upgrade to El Capitan on a remote Mac mini

Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 3.30.22 PM
Apple has released OS X El Capitan today and it’s a great update. As with every OS X update, we predict that the hundred of Mac minis in our data center will get upgraded. A few notes for those ready to upgrade:

  1. Please, please get a backup. For the most part, upgrades have been pretty smooth in our testing. However, each setup is different and there is always a chance of a corrupt upgrade that could break your setup. We have options to add an external drive if you would like to take that route. At a minimum, get a disk image of your boot drive and store it locally or on a remote service like Dropbox.
  2. The upgrade can be done remotely. You just need to open the App Store, download the update, and let it run. If you keep your screen sharing window open, it’ll come back and you can watch part of the upgrades. Regardless, plan for your mini to be offline for about an hour. If it runs longer than an hour, just put in a ticket on the support site and we can help you troubleshoot.Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 3.28.51 PM
  3. If you want to use this chance to get a clean install of OS X, we’re happy to help you do that. (It needs to be done locally since a clean install would have no networking information.) Just let us know with a ticket.
  4. If you’d like to have both a clean install of OS X, and also get a faster Mac mini, be sure to check our page of used Mac minis. We have some powerful, quad-core options available right now. We can run the new and old minis simultaneously for a while so you have time to get data moved over.
  5. We’ve been testing El Capitan and sent tweets on some of our findings. One especially great upgrade in 10.11.1 is drastically improved screen sharing. Look forward to that.

Enjoy the new version of OS X. As usual, we’re here to help if needed.