hey what's up it's Jerad with State of tech and today we're gonna update a MacBook
Pro to Mojave so this is gonna work for any Mac it doesn't really matter what
type of Mac that you're on as long as it is able to accept this at this update
and I'll provide a link down in the description below so if you do have an
older Mac before you go through this process you can check to make sure that
it is supported but Apple does a really good job of supporting much older
systems and from what I've heard Mojave brings a lot of good life and renewed
life to those older devices so of course it's pretty easy to upgrade to Mojave
Apple makes it extremely easy but there's really a safe way to do this you
want to make sure that you have a backup of your system and just in conversations
I've had with a lot of people and when I've gone to help them with their max I
know that not everybody has a backup going and what that means is that if
there was any problem perhaps maybe the installation didn't go through and you
had your computer crashed or something like that
you wouldn't have a backup you wouldn't have a way to get your computer back to
the way that it was alternatively maybe you don't like Mojave the way that it
performs on your system and you want to roll back to the way that it was you're
definitely gonna need to have a Time Machine backup of your system for that
and it's good to just be running a Time Machine backup anyways because if you're
a laptop if your computer's a laptop and it gets stolen water damage something
like that and you have to go and get a new computer or maybe it's an iMac or
something it gets stolen something happens of course you're gonna need that
time machine back up to in order to restore your machine back to exactly
where it was Apple does a great job at this so we're gonna look at that process
okay so right now you're looking at my screen I have High Sierra running on
this Mac so it's been updated as far as it would go before Mohave and so I have
the App Store opened and this is where we're actually going to download the new
version from of Mojave and after your last update it may even give you the
option to turn on automatic updates so I'm just gonna
say not now I'm gonna hold off on this because we want to run our time machine
back up first so what you're gonna need in order to do a time machine back up is
an external hard drive to plug into your computer now I've got a list of a couple
of hard drives that I prefer that I recommend down in the description below
but you're gonna need one of those in order to do this so there are a couple
different hard drives you can go with the older style hard drives that have
the spinning discs inside which are definitely cheaper and you can get large
versions of those drives for a really good price or if you want something
faster you can go with a solid-state drive such as one of these Samsung SSDs
this is a samsung portable t5 SSD that's one terabyte so you're also going to
need to make sure that the drive that you get has enough room to backup your
entire system if you have a terabyte drive inside of your system you're gonna
need a terabyte backup if you're on maybe an iMac or something and you have
a 4 terabyte drive or something larger inside of that iMac you're gonna need a
backup drive that at least has enough room to cover what's on your computer
now if you have a larger storage amount on your computer but you're not using up
all of that space you only need a drive that's gonna be I have enough room in
order to backup what you have on that computer so to find out what you've got
going on go up to your Apple menu go down to about this Mac and then click on
the storage tab and this is gonna tell you how much you have available notice
if I mouse over the grey space it says that I have a lot of room available of
that space and then of course I can look and see how much as being used and
that's what you need a hard drive to cover so since this Mac I haven't been
using it too much it doesn't have a whole lot on here this process is going
to be simple but for those of you out there that have been using your Mac for
quite some time you probably have a lot of stuff on your system and you want to
make sure that's backed up now one easy way to make sure that you're not keeping
too much stuff on your system and that you have your important stuff backed up
so as your photos and videos is to use
google photos so if you go to photos google.com from your computer you can
download the Google Photos app and allow that to run in the background using your
gmail account or your Google account and it's gonna backup all photos and videos
that you have saved on your computer and it's actually free to do that
Google photos does a light compression to your photos just to make sure that
they're not taking up too much space but in my just a couple of years I guess now
if using that service the compression that they add is very minimal and the
photos stay looking amazing I've even printed some out after they've
been uploaded to Google photos and they still look fantastic
so utilize Google photos it's free it's definitely much cheaper than using
iCloud drive to backup all of your photos that's another option with the
Mac is using iCloud Drive and then of course buying additional storage from
Apple so what I'm talking about here though is not iCloud drive you can use
iCloud Drive to backup your desktop and your photos and your Documents folder
and stuff like that but iCloud Drive doesn't actually backup your entire
system it's just for backing up your documents so in order to backup your
system so that you have a way to completely restore that system should
you need to you're gonna want to use Time Machine backup and we're gonna walk
through setting that up right now so I have a solid-state drive here attached
to a USB cable and because I'm on a newer macbook pro here that doesn't have
USB type a anymore i need this adapter this dongle to convert USB a to USB C so
I'm gonna go ahead and plug that in and then I'm ready to plug my drive right
into my computer now if this is a brand new drive that you've never used before
or it's not formatted for the Mac then one of the things that's gonna happen
after a couple of seconds of it looking at that drive is time machines actually
just gonna pop up and say hey do you want to make this your time machine
backup drive so we're gonna see that pop up here in a second and there it is so
it says do you want to use new volume to backup with your time machine
now it's gonna say whatever the name of that drive is and this is gonna require
you to format that drive so if this is a drive that you've already had for a
while make sure that you have everything off of it because once you start this
process it's gonna format the drive and that means that your drive is gonna lose
whatever was on it so you want to make sure that you're not using a drive that
you've already been using to backup other files or that you might have
something important on I highly recommend just getting a dedicated drive
to utilize for Time Machine backups so now I can choose encrypt backup disk
decide later don't use or use as a backup disk now if you don't see this
message pop up it means that you have already at one point in time done a Time
Machine backup and even though your Time Machine backup might not be running
anymore it's still it still assumes that you're you've got it figured out so if
this message doesn't show up then here's what you're gonna do so I'm just gonna
bypass this by clicking decide later but we're going to go into our system
preferences and in our system preferences down towards the bottom
choose Time Machine now I want to choose backup automatically and it's gonna ask
me to choose a drive now if you have a drive listed in here you can click
select backup disk and just delete the one that's already in there or you can
leave it and you can just start a whole new backup so I'm going to click on
backup automatically click that new volume I'm gonna choose encrypt because
I want this to be safe what encryption means is that it's actually gonna add a
layer of security over your backup so that way if somebody steals your backup
disk and they go and try and restore their computer with it which would
essentially give them a complete copy of your computer they're not going to be
able to do so without this password so I'm gonna go ahead and put in a password
and i'm gonna choose encrypt disk and it's gonna tell me that I am gonna be
erasing this disk now as I mentioned you want to be very careful there if you've
used this hard drive before make sure that you've taken everything off of it
and copied it over to something else before you do this so now the process is
starting and it's going to go ahead and crip that drive and then it's gonna
start the backup process now if you want to know when these backups are happening
you can click the button down here that says show time machine in the menu bar
so if I show time machine in the menu bar I'll see it up top and when the
back-up is actually happening it will be rotating and and letting me know that
the backup is taking place however this is always gonna run in the background
and so there's really no need to have that message up there I'm just gonna go
ahead and opt to not show it up in the and the menu bar I like to have my menu
bar clean and typically what I would do is have this run during a certain time
maybe I'd leave my computer on at night once a week or something when plugged in
and it's gonna go ahead and run that but the cool thing is is after it's Ram that
initial backup because the first time is gonna take a while especially if you
have a lot of stuff saved on your computer
the first backups gonna take some time after that it's only backing up things
that have changed so the process is way faster every single time and it's not
going to take nearly as much time it will tell you on the screen after a
minute or so of backing up the calculated time remaining so that you
can get an idea of how long it's gonna take but what I recommend doing if this
is the first time that you've done this and you have a lot of stuff on your
computer is just make sure that your computer is set to not go to sleep
overnight and it will just continue to run overnight leave it plugged into
power and it will just run that back up overnight and probably by the time you
get up in the morning it will be ready to go in order to make sure that your
computer doesn't go to sleep go back to your system preferences go to energy
saver and then make sure that you just choose prevent computer from sleeping
automatically when the display is off and I'm gonna go ahead and hit OK for
that I'm also gonna choose untag will put hard disk to sleep when possible I
mean that used to be a cool feature when you had a spinning hard drive but now
that we have a lot of solid-state drives in our computers it doesn't matter so I
just kind of set that that way so that way if I have things running in the
background I don't have to worry about it so while it's doing that
back up and I recommend allowing this backup to complete first but since I
already have a backup of my computer I don't need to wait for this process to
complete next we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna choose Mac OS Mojave from
the App Store so make sure that you open the App Store if you don't see Mac OS
Mojave showing up in the App Store it means that you still have some other
software updates that you need to run so make sure to go to the Updates tab on
the App Store and run any updates that you have available beforehand I don't
have any updates that are related to Mac OS and so I could just continue and move
right along so I'm going to click on Mac OS Mojave I'm gonna click download and
it's gonna download that in the background and so turn on auto updates
at this point I'll just go ahead and say yes like I want my updates to run
automatically so go ahead and do that so now with it downloading it's gonna take
probably it says about eight minutes or so for that to happen because it is a
rather big file so I'm gonna go ahead and fast forward do this process and
then jump right back into the update process with you guys so let's do that
okay so when it's ready and it's finished downloading you're gonna see
the Mac OS Mojave installation screen so we're gonna click on continue click on
agree click on agree again we'll choose our Mac hard drive and then click
install will then need to authenticate either with our fingerprint or a
password depending on what's available for your system and it's gonna go ahead
and go through the process of unpacking the install file getting it ready and
all that stuff so after what it says on my system about 15 minutes which anybody
who's ran a software update on a Mac before knows that that can vary
drastically after this wait it's gonna go ahead and require a restart and
sometimes maybe even a second restart so you may see a black screen for a little
bit you may come back to your computer turned off wait for a second for it to
turn back on it actually never will fully turn off but that restart process
may make it look like it's turned off so if throughout this process anything gets
weird like it actually does completely turn off go ahead and turn the system
back on if it's been trying to install for a very very long time
and nothing seems to have progressed the bars or something's frozen go ahead and
just do a force shutdown and restart and typically you can do that by pressing
and holding down the power button for a long period of time the system will
reboot and then it should pick up right where it left off but this is where it's
important that we have that backup because if something does go sideways
and our process of updating to Mojave doesn't work then we may need to fix our
system and that's where having a good backup comes in place so please please
make sure that you have a good backup in place all right so I'm gonna go ahead
and fast-forward to the point where this is done and I'm ready to go and if
there's any more prompts of course along the way I'll show those to you
so when the install process is over you're gonna land on a screen that's
gonna ask you to sign in with your password and then choose whether you
want the light or the dark look so I'm gonna go ahead and choose the dark just
because I want to give that a try and it's gonna go ahead and finish the setup
process and then we're good to go so I'm gonna hit OK on a couple little
pop-ups and I've got it opened up my browser right where I left off and all
that good stuff so let's take a look at what we have here so some applications
may open up and ask for additional options like accessibility features so
if you need to do that it's just gonna request you logging in here and it'll
walk through those things everything differs depending on what
software you're using so I'm just going to go ahead and approve those and it
looks like I am good to go here it's everything is installed everything is
working the dark mode is kind of neat it's gonna take some getting used to for
sure but I definitely like what I'm seeing so far so anyways if everything
went according to plan then great fantastic I recommend keeping
your drive plugged in for that Time Machine backup there's gonna be a lot of
stuff now to backup so you'll want to make sure that that process happens
again if you did have any problems and something went sideways you're just
gonna need to follow the instructions I'll put a link down in the description
below that will show you how to get into the recovery area of your laptop or your
desktop whichever Mac and then you can restore using that time machine back up
so there's a link down in the description below for that too so that's
gonna do it for this video my fans are running so I'm gonna get
going here start using this Mac and get a little bit used to this Mojave
experience but that's going to do it for this video if you found it useful give
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lot of content teaching you how to use your technology better and we'd love to
have you along for the ride so thanks so much for checking out this video
and we hope to see you back here in the next one