I want to upgrade my mid-2010 Mac Pro from MacOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra) to 10.14 (Mojave).
What is the actual difference between doing an upgrade and a clean install?
And are there other ways to upgrade (I seem to recall an option after booting into "recovery mode" (CMD-R while booting) which reinstalls the existing OS, but I'm not sure what this actually does)?
The computer appears to work fine/there aren't any apparent bugs or shortcomings that I know of: but having used it for several years you never know what's going on "under the hood", and in the past I've always chosen to do a clean install when upgrading the OS, just to be sure I don't pass along any problems to the new OS.
So why am I asking about this? Well, I've set up my Mac Pro with MacOS and the apps on an SSD, while all user's home folders are on a separate hard drive. If I was to do a clean install I would have to "join" the Home folders with the appropriate usernames I'd create (which would be a hassle given that there's quite a lot of data on that drive), but as far as I know, when doing a normal upgrade the OS would keep all the login info/user configurations as they were before the upgrade -this would be a lot easier, but I'm not sure how much "cleanup" such an upgrade does compared to a clean install.
What is the actual difference between doing an upgrade and a clean install?
And are there other ways to upgrade (I seem to recall an option after booting into "recovery mode" (CMD-R while booting) which reinstalls the existing OS, but I'm not sure what this actually does)?
The computer appears to work fine/there aren't any apparent bugs or shortcomings that I know of: but having used it for several years you never know what's going on "under the hood", and in the past I've always chosen to do a clean install when upgrading the OS, just to be sure I don't pass along any problems to the new OS.
So why am I asking about this? Well, I've set up my Mac Pro with MacOS and the apps on an SSD, while all user's home folders are on a separate hard drive. If I was to do a clean install I would have to "join" the Home folders with the appropriate usernames I'd create (which would be a hassle given that there's quite a lot of data on that drive), but as far as I know, when doing a normal upgrade the OS would keep all the login info/user configurations as they were before the upgrade -this would be a lot easier, but I'm not sure how much "cleanup" such an upgrade does compared to a clean install.
