On the next screen you’ll choose a destination drive where you want to restore the backup to, which will be your main disk drive on your Mac, usually titled Macintosh HD. You can easily see the OS X version off to the right-hand side. Select the latest date and time that you remember running OS X Yosemite on. The next screen will have you select a date and time that you want to revert back to. You’ll eventually see the Select a Backup Source screen, choose the Time Machine drive that you use for backups and then click Continue. You can also hold Option/Alt and simply choose Recovery-10.11 from the menu that appears.Īt the OS X Utilities menu, click on Restore From Time Machine Backup and then plug in the hard drive that you use for Time Machine if it isn’t already. Now, you’ll want to restart your Mac and hold down Cmd+R. I would recommend taking all of your ultra-important files and transferring them to a USB drive separately from your Time Machine backup, just to be extra safe.
However, before you begin, make sure to back up your Mac one last time before you begin the downgrading process. If you already use Time Machine and have been using it, you most likely have the required backup needed, since it will automatically back up your Mac every day. This method simply involves restoring a Time Machine backup to a point where you had OS X Yosemite, and it’s perhaps the easiest method to use in order to downgrade to OS X Yosemite. No matter which method you choose for downgrading, it’s important that you have a backup of your Mac, either with Time Machine or some other backup service, but the first method that I’ll describe requires that you have a Time Machine backup.
However, new features aside, if you’re not a big fan of the update or are having issues with the new version of OS X, you can actually downgrade to OS X Yosemite, and there are a couple of ways to do it. In OS X El Capitan, there’s also better Spotlight Search results and improvements all around, and it can now show you weather, sports scores, and more information that it wasn’t able to provide in the past.
Read: How to Perform a Clean Install of OS X El Capitan There’s also new swipe gestures that you can use across a handful of apps, like Mail and Safari, making it easier to manage email, as well as pin tabs in Safari to save them for later. Of course, you were able to do this before, but you would have to manually resize the windows instead of them automatically resizing for you. There’s a new Split View multitasking feature that allows users to snap windows to the sides and run two apps at once (similar to Windows’ Aero Snap feature). OS X El Capitan was officially released today and many users are already running the new version of OS X, which isn’t too surprising as it comes with a bevy of new features that users can take advantage of. If you updated your Mac to OS X El Capitan, but aren’t too fond of the new version and would rather downgrade to OS X Yosemite, here’s how to do it.