Converting from high sierra to either Catalina or Big Sur

Question

I am currently running the most recent version of Quicken on High Sierra on a late 2013 iMac. The hard disk is failing so I have to make a switch very quickly. One option is to put a new hard drive in and upgrade to Catalina and buy myself a year or two. Another is to look for a refurbished Intel iMac and upgrade to Big Sur but I am having trouble finding a good one with an SSD.  The last option is to buy the new iMac but I really don’t like the white bezels and pastel colors and I can’t get one for six weeks. The drive could be gone long before then.

Any advice on how Quicken runs on Catalina versus Big Sur… One better than the other? I’d like to go to Big Sur because the security updates would be better and I was hoping my current Mac would last until they came out with a different design for the new IMacs but it looks like I need to make a decision very quickly.

Any advice or ideas from this community would be appreciated

Quicken Francisco · Accepted Answer

Hello
@pamela77

Thank
you for reaching out to the Community regarding your issue, although I am sorry
to hear that you are experiencing issues with your current computer. As far as Quicken goes on whether it's better on Catalina or Big Sur they should run similarly overall as long as you're able a solution to your hard drive you shouldn't experience any performance issues.

I do wish you luck with the computer troubles and I believe a couple of other users may have some more recommendations on what could be best.

Thanks,

Quicken
Francisco

jacobs · Accepted Answer

As Francisco says, there's no difference in Quicken between Catalina and Big Sur, unless you're on an M1 Mac; Quicken runs natively on the M1 Mac, so you'd likely see it run faster if you got a new Mac than an older Intel one. Whether that performance difference would be significant and important to you, only you could determine.

One thought: what if you got an external drive, installed some version of macOS, and migrated all your applications and data to the external drive. You could boot from the external drive and ignore your internal drive. Then, whenever you can get a new Mac, you could use the external drive for your Time Machine backups. It's an inexpensive stop-gap, and easier than opening the Mac to replace the hard drive. Just a thought.

pamela77 · Accepted Answer

Thank you for that interesting idea. That’s the kind of creative thinking I was hoping for. This community is so helpful. I will look into that option, thank you

india just · Accepted Answer

I had a hard drive failure years ago. As I noticed issues on boot, I saved numerous copies of my quicken datafile. Most were scrambled but my external drive managed to save a few of the copies and at least one was usable. I rely on TimeMachine now.

A bootable external drive can be used to diagnose and attempt repair of the installed drive too, provided the internal drive will still mount.  This used to be a speedup technique: put the OS on a separate disk or  segment the drive to specify the fastest part of the disk for the OS only. You could scramble the OS with no risk of data damage.

I used QMAC 2006 on a late 2012 mac mini with no issues on either Catalina or Big Sur, including the update to the current subscription product.