Problems after installing the Apple Catalina OS update. What did it do for me ?

I installed Catalina yesterday on my MacBook Pro. Written 9 October 2019 by Phil Whitten

I have not found any new features that work for, or are of any use to me. In fact the reverse.

Firstly it did take a couple of hours to install.

It is a wholly 64 bit OS and that may mean that it is more secure. However as such it will not run any 32 bit programs.

I knew that I had and used some of these old programs and so I had a choice of remaining with the existing OS or biting the bullet and keeping the device up to date.

After the update my FTP program, Picasa, Photoshop elements, my special text editor for xml files, etc. did not work. I did know that this would happen one day but it was a bit of a shock when that day arrived. I have had to pay for some new software.

None of the new built in stuff is of any use to me and in the main you need paid for subscriptions to use it anyway.

One feature that I had a feeling may be of vague use was Sidecar. This allows you to use an iPad as a second screen under some circumstances. However it only works on recent laptops and not mine (mid 2015).

The new OS took up more of my drive and as it is SSD it was already getting a bit low.

I ran the “About this mac” feature and then looked at storage. It told me that I had a staggering 157.65GB of storage being used by mail.

I then spent a few hours trying to delete old emails and remove old attachments but after hours of effort, the memory use was showing as exactly the same.

There were loads of red herrings on the Apple website and these listed things to do to save space. I did them but still the memory use did not budge.

I started using other methods to determine the size of my Gmail. When looking on Google I could see that I was using about 11GB of space.

Then I started using Finder to see if I could see where all the memory was being gobbled up on the laptop. Eventually I found it.

If you use gmail but under the apple mail umbrella it save multiple drafts of every email in a folder called Drafts.mbox. This had loads of sub folders in it and those folders consumed over 130 GB of memory. I deleted the sub folders and then emptied the waste bin. It deleted about 1.5 million files and suddenly my mail folder usage is reported as 320 MB rather than 157 GB.

So the only things achieved for me is to have a fully 64bit OS and the need to learn how to use some new software that I have purchased.