Etrecheck report advice and help

I would go a step further and say that 4 GB of RAM isn't really sufficient to run Big Sur or Catalina. It's simply going to run slowly. The only other thing you can do is some maintenance items which can help a bit. Any of the following actions may be helpful.

·      It is important to occasionally restart a Mac. Ideally, once a week or more often. This does some system cleaning.

·      Regularly clearing the history of your browsers can help as all the data is stored in RAM. Clearing frees up RAM for system use. This is good since you have so little RAM installed.

·      Some people seldom empty their trash. If you haven’t, then do so. Also empty your email trash.

·      Some programs use a lot of RAM. (Like many Adobe apps and the Chrome browser, which is a known RAM hog.) When using them, close any other apps not being used.

·      Doing a restart in the safe mode can clear a number of problems. This is done by holding down the Shift key at start up. This process can take up to ten minutes while the computer is doing its maintenance and cleans the cache. You may then restart normally.

·      It is also a good idea to periodically run the Disk Utility app. If it reports some issues, then rerun it repeatedly as needed until the final report is ok.

I hope these suggestions are helpful and enable you to speed up your computer somewhat.

The only thing under your control that jumps out - Time Machine Backup is out dated. Really should perform this backup just before having it serviced. The amount of RAM is barely adequate to run Big Sur - 4 GB is doable but will really put a strain on the system for your usage and performance.

You should download EtreCheckPro and use that to post a new report. The Mac App Store version of EtreCheck that you were using cannot see all of the relevant information. It has been discontinued in favour of EtreCheckPro.

Your computer is showing a runaway process and an extraordinarily high level of disk usage. This could be caused by a local snapshot. It is difficult to tell with the Mac App Store version of EtreCheck. In theory, if this is a local snapshot, it should only be temporary. But if you always have the same results on all EtreCheck reports, then it could be a problem.

If this is a problem with local snapshots, your ancient Time Machine may be contributing to the problem. You just can’t go wrong by keeping your backup up-to-date.

Also, you seem to have some corrupted files that could be causing problems with your backups. Your crash reports give you some hints about how to diagnose the problem. They say to run the following in the Terminal:

sudo mdutil -t 12943437484