Need To Find An Old macOS Installer? Here's How
One of the team was asking if any of us had kept our macOS Catalina installer and unfortunately none of had, or in some cases, we hadn’t ventured that far. Back in the day, it was relatively easy to get a download link for older macOS Installers, but in more recent times it has become harder and harder. In this article, we uncover a safe way to get older macOS Installers.
Try The Mac App Store?
There was a time when you could look in your ‘Purchased’ List in your Mac App Store application, but Apple seems to have removed that option if you are running macOS Mojave or later.
What Now?
Our research showed that there was a solution using a site from DosDude, which was set up to help people install later versions of a macOS onto Macs that officially don’t support that version of the macOS. However, the site is not secure and people have voiced their concerns of how safe this site, is and despite reassurances from respectable sites including Mac Rumors, those concerns contuinue, so we kept digging…
We Found The Gold!
Apparently, they are still in the Mac App Store, they are being hidden by Apple from users. As long as you have the links you can get the latest installers for the following versions of the macOS…
For this to work you will need to download from a Mac that is using macOS Sierra 10.12.5 or later, or El Capitan 10.11.6. This will not work on machines with an earlier OS because this depends on the Mac App Store, which won’t be on earlier Macs.
When you click on any of these links, you will be asked if you want to open the Mac App Store…
Agree to open the Mac App Store and you will get the appropriate page in the store for the operating system you want to download.
Click the Get button and that will open the Software Update tab in System Preferences…
Click the download button and it will start downloading the installer to your Application folder.
If the installer opens after downloading, quit it without continuing installation. Do this from the Installer menu, the red close button is greyed out and is not available.
If you want to store that somewhere then copy the installer to an appropriate place on your system.
I have a dedicated folder on one of my servers…