Today’s update:
2 TB SSD external drive arrived yesterday (Thank you Amazon Prime Day). Reformatted and partitioned into 2 1TB sections. First one is a bootable backup of internal hard drive as of last night. BU Just finished after 10.35 hours running time.
Next up, totally clean install of Catalina on the other partition and a slow install of all my current software direct from original distributions, no migration of my system over.
Meanwhile, I am working to clean out email (the bane of my inbox zero aspirations) and archive most of it into my external DEVONThink database. Idea is that I might be able to just start with a new instance of the mail app in the clean system, add in all my email addresses and start fresh. I am on POP mail so the mac is my archive of all messages. Still debating that but at the current rate of update, backup, verify of software I won’t even be to that point for at least a week.
Meanwhile, back on the rotating internal drive, I haven’t run it long enough to verify but bootups are still 5-7 minutes long and shutdowns about the same so no significant improvements there. I will be giving the system a workout today, I’ve got some major work to do in PyCharm along with a massive spreadsheet update/sqlite rebuild project that I am slowly plugging away at. Going back and forth between those apps has been a guaranteed way to get things to slow to a crawl. This will be the first big real-life test after the wipe and reinstall I just completed. I didn’t want to do much until I had a good backup of the system as it exists now.