“Creating a dual boot environment is an ideal solution for Mac users who want to install and try macOS Sierra but without interfering with their primary stable Mac OS X El Capitan installation,” OS X Daily explains. “This tutorial will walk through the entire process of setting up such an environment, including partition a disk, and installing macOS Sierra 10.12 beta onto that partition to allow for a dual boot.”
“Completing a full system backup beforehand is essential,” OS X Daily writes. “While we’re focusing on installing MacOS Sierra onto a partition for dual boot purposes, you can also install macOS Sierra onto an external hard drive, a USB drive, or even an SD card, and have the same dual boot situation between the macOS Sierra beta and the OS X El Capitan stable release, though performance is usually not as good when an operating system is running off an external volume.”
“Be sure you have backed up your Mac before beginning this process. You will be partitioning a hard drive and then installing beta system software,” OS X Daily writes. “Failure to adequately backup your Mac and your data may result in permanent data loss, do not skip a backup.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Backup first! Also, for safety’s sake, if possible, do as we do when testing betas and install macOS Sierra on an external drive and boot from that (hold down the Option key when you hear your Mac’s boot chime and select the desired drive and operating system).
Or just use an external hard drive or separate partition?
I have a separate drive inside my Mac Pro just for the beta so that my regular install never gets touched.
Eh, I don’t really care about that. I keep everything in iCloud, and everything important is also backed up to Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive as a duplicate copy. So it doesn’t even matter if my entire MacBook just completely dies. It can be beta and I’m fine with that. I don’t even feel a sense of risk whatsoever.
Even so, I almost forgot that I do also have a Time Capsule running regular backups as well.