Monterey and Adobe CC apps

Hi Isaiah.

There is not that much of a change between Catalina and Monterey as far as Adobe products are concerned.

A few reports have appeared around the web from users experiencing some bugs in Adobe CC apps after upgrading to Monterey, equally, there are even more reports of Adobe CC apps displaying bugs on older Windows and macOS’s after Adobe issued their own cloud updates to CC apps.

In all the completed reports I read where a reason was found these were due to random pre-existing bugs in the owners software environment and not a specific flaw in either Monterey or Adobe CC.

If you want to be ultra-cautious I would suggest these steps:

• Before upgrading to Monterey trigger a Time Machine back-up to your existing Time Machine disk.
• After the Time Machine backup is complete physically disconnect that disk from the Mac or network.
• Restart your Mac one-time-only in Safe-Mode, let the Mac boot to the desktop and wait a further ten minutes.
• After the Safe-Mode boot, restart the Mac in Normal Mode and connect a clean external disk to the Mac.
• Create a fresh Time Machine backup on the new disk, do not stop using the old disk when asked but choose “Use both”.
• Disconnect the new disk after the back-up is complete and put it to one side.
• Upgrade to Monterey.

After the upgrade to Monterey leave your Time Machine backup disks disconnected while you test your Adobe CC apps.

If you find any major problems with your CC apps in Monterey you can boot the Mac into Recovery Mode and wipe the hard drive clean, install macOS Catalina and restore from either your new or original Time Machine backups.

The original Time Machine backup will be an exact copy of your user environment but may have accumulated a few bugs over the years.

The new Time Machine backup after the Safe-Mode boot will have been created after the Safe-Boot process checked your user environment and system settings for underlying and otherwise hidden problems and automatically repaired them.

Use the post Safe-Mode Time Machine backup to restore from.

As soon as the restore process is complete, and within one minute of booting to your desktop, enter Time Machine settings and switch off automatic backups, you don’t want to overwrite either old or new Time Machine backup disks until you are happy that Adobe CC is working as expected in Monterey.

If you find that Adobe CC is not working as expected after restoring from the new Time Machine backup repeat the entire process and use the older, original Time Machine backup disk.

The original Time-Machine backup *should* restore your system after a disk wipe and Catalina install to exactly the way it was before.

After verifying that your Adobe apps are performing as expected, either in Monterey or on a restored Catalina build, return to Time Machine and re-enable automatic Time Machine backups to one of the backup disks.

Use the old backup disk if you rolled back to Catalina and the pre Safe-Mode boot Time Machine, use the new disk if you upgraded successfully to Monterey and your Adobe CC apps performed as expected.

Archive the unused backup disk if desired or wipe it and re-purpose the disk for other uses.

Make sure to enter Time Machine settings and remove the unused backup disk as a Time Machine destination.

The above steps describe how to use Apple Time Machine as part of a “belts-and-braces” upgrade and restore process.

A much simpler and quicker method is to use a third-party disk cloning application to make an exact copy of your existing Mac hard drive on a separate external disk as a snapshot-in-time and use that cloning application with the disk to restore the Mac exactly as it was prior to upgrading to Monterey.

The disk cloning method is used extensively in IT because it is both faster and more accurate than Time Machine since it is an exact copy of the entire disk contents and not just the user settings which Time Machine stores.

Armed with the above notes you should be ready to upgrade to Monterey and have a choice of recovery methods should your Adobe apps not work as expected after the upgrade.

HTH

Will.

Did Adobe say that Monterey was required.