What methods exist to maintain access to old Adobe applications during an operating system upgrade?
What methods exist to maintain access to old Adobe applications during an operating system upgrade?
Are you certain? I've been cloning Windows drives for years without any issues starting them up. It happened again last week for a colleague who was using W11 on an HDD—it was extremely slow. I cloned the drive to a NVMe using Clonezilla, booted in safe mode, and it worked perfectly. Never tried with a USB drive, but I can't see why it wouldn't be possible. You should definitely try a fresh installation (https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-run-...-usb-drive). I don't know about Macs though.
Cloning to an external USB device and starting from another PC is improbable.
Just wanted to share an update. I purchased the SanDisk "extreme" 1TB SSD and used CCC to clone my internal drive onto it. Everything functioned perfectly and the whole process took only 34 minutes. After booting the external drive, the Adobe applications ran just as expected, with no problems. I upgraded my operating system to BigSur and am now organizing everything and giving this iMac a fresh start. I'm really satisfied with the result and would definitely recommend both the SanDisk Extreme SSD and CCC. In fact, CCC is one of the top software I've used, and it's completely free for 30 days—great work by the team behind it.
The only concern is that I haven't yet tried booting the external drive after upgrading my OS, so I'll test that next to confirm the Adobe apps still work. I'm a bit worried about a possible "firmware update" affecting activation, but we'll find out.
Thanks to everyone who supported me through this process.