{"id":49915,"date":"2019-06-27T14:25:43","date_gmt":"2019-06-27T19:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=49915"},"modified":"2019-10-09T12:02:15","modified_gmt":"2019-10-09T17:02:15","slug":"tech-tip-two-more-ways-to-load-catalina-beta-onto-your-mac-including-the-best-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/49915-tech-tip-two-more-ways-to-load-catalina-beta-onto-your-mac-including-the-best-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Tip: Two More Ways to Load Catalina Beta onto your Mac, Including the Best Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"macOS<\/a>The other day, we showed developers how to install macOS 10.15 Catalina Developer Beta 1 onto a Parallels Desktop virtual machine<\/a>. At the same time, we offered a few cautions about doing so — the beta operating system runs slowly on Parallels at this point and there are some other issues. On Monday, June 24, Apple released the first Public Beta of Catalina, so anyone can give it a try. In today’s article, I’ll show you two more methods of installing the beta of Catalina onto your Mac\u2014including one that I consider being the best possible way to test Catalina’s features.<\/p>\n

Wait \u2013 Why Can\u2019t I Just Run the Beta on the Primary Boot Drive in My Mac?<\/h2>\n

You can<\/em>. However, Catalina is currently called a beta operating system for a reason \u2014 not all features are working, it hasn’t been optimized for performance, and it may not work with all of the apps on your Mac.<\/p>\n

If you have more than one Mac and have no issues with possibly breaking some apps, then, by all means, feel free to install the Catalina Public Beta on one of your computers. Just don’t install Catalina on your main “production” Mac’s primary boot drive if you want to have a machine that’s always going to work for you.<\/p>\n

For those who have just one Mac or can’t afford potential downtime by installing Catalina over the currently installed version of Mojave, an external boot drive is a great idea. You can boot your Mac from the external drive to try out Catalina features, or boot it from the internal drive to “get back to work”. If you just have a USB external drive, you will find that running from that drive is just about as slow as running the virtual machine. Things are much more responsive if your external boot drive is a Thunderbolt 3 SSD like the speedy new OWC Envoy Pro EX<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ll describe the external drive method at the end of this article, but first I’ll let you in on a little secret…<\/p>\n

The best and fastest way to run Catalina on your Mac is to create an APFS (Apple File System) volume on your boot drive and then install Catalina onto it.<\/strong> You can then either boot into your Mojave Mac or the Catalina Mac just by holding down the Option key when you’re booting the computer. A list of boot drives appears, from which you select either Mojave or Catalina.<\/p>\n

The APFS Volume Method<\/h2>\n

You’ll need a Mac that can run Catalina<\/a>:<\/p>\n