Question How can I preserve my suite of outdated Adobe apps, while still upgrading my OS?

Feb 10, 2025
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Hi, I know this is sort of a ridiculous question but I'm going to post it anyway. I have several thousand dollars worth of old adobe apps that I would like to preserve in case I ever decide to learn them (I bought my late-2014 iMac from a scientist who legitimately owned and used all the apps until he sold the computer to me), but I'm having a hard time letting them go.

The problem is, I'm running an old unsupported version of Mac OS X (El Capitan - 10.11.6) and once I upgrade to a newer OS, my adobe apps will no longer work (due to the new subscription model). I will lose them all. So I'm trying to see if I can migrate them over to a USB drive and preserve them somehow. Just transferring the apps themselves over to the USB will not work, right? I think I need to either clone my internal drive over to an external drive, or partition my internal drive into 2 volumes so that I can run 2 OS's...one volume running El Capitan with my Adobe apps and the second volume running an upgraded OS. The problem is, because my iMac is older (late-2014), I would need to completely erase and reformat the internal drive to a different format (from HFS+ to APFS) before I partition it and I don't really want to go through all that. Can you tell me what my options might be? BIG THANKS!

PS - If I decide to go the cloning method, my external drive needs to be at least as big as the internal drive that I'm trying to clone, right? If so, I guess I'd need a 1TB drive.

PS2 - Am I being ridiculous about trying to keep these apps? I know I'm going to get some flack for it...especially seeing as I'm not a professional and I've never actually learned or utilized any of the apps in the years that I've owned them. I just feel like there still might be a time in the near future where I decide I want to learn PS, Illustrator, or Premiere (using tutorials) and once I throw them away (by upgrading without preserving them)...they are gone forever and I'll be forced to pay the subscription fee if I ever want to learn them. If a time came when I DID ACTUALLY learn the apps, I would surely discard these old versions (CS6 & 2018) and pay the fee to use the new versions. I think I paid $600 for this machine back in 2019 (or 2020) and I felt like the inclusion of the entire adobe creative suite was a pretty big part of the incentive to buy it...although the machine was still worth it without them.

PS3 - I have an older 2009 Macbook that I'd be willing to keep and use exclusively for running my Adobe apps, but I don'y know what I need to do in order to run those apps on that machine. Can I just transfer them over somehow? Or can I transfer the apps to a USB drive to use on that machine? It's running El Cap, same as my iMac.
 
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Learn Gimp, Inkscape, Davinci Resolve. All open source equivalents.

You could potentially clone the system and then run it inside of a Virtual Machine, but it is possible that alone would break the application's license activation.
 
old app not going to work with new OS

PS2 yes
Well I was actually considering running 2 separate OS's on my iMac, of which 1 of them would run El Capitan exclusively for using the adobe apps, while the other partition would be upgraded to OS BigSur. Thanks for your input on PS2.
Learn Gimp, Inkscape, Davinci Resolve. All open source equivalents.

You could potentially clone the system and then run it inside of a Virtual Machine, but it is possible that alone would break the application's license activation.
Yeah, thats what I was considering...I'll just have to accept the fact that Adobe is gone and consider learning equivalent apps like the ones you mentioned. I've considered the VM scenario but read that it might not function properly as the apps were not designed to run in that environment. Thanks for your input.
Is actual Adobe applications required?

There are multiple other low cost or free alternatives.

"and I've never actually learned or utilized any of the apps in the years that I've owned them."
Let it go.
Yeah. Unfortunately I'm in a scenario where a certain family member of mine is going to think that I was too lazy to learn how to properly back up the apps and that I just threw them away out of convenience...and then I'll have to try and explain to him that it's not really possible to keep these outdated apps unless I want to continue running El Capitan forever...which I most assuredly do not want to do. Oh well. Thanks for your input.
 
Yeah. Unfortunately I'm in a scenario where a certain family member of mine is going to think that I was too lazy to learn how to properly back up the apps and that I just threw them away out of convenience...and then I'll have to try and explain to him that it's not really possible to keep these outdated apps unless I want to continue running El Capitan forever...which I most assuredly do not want to do. Oh well. Thanks for your input.
While backups are a needed thing (esp data), that fail is on them, not you.
 
Learn Gimp, Inkscape, Davinci Resolve. All open source equivalents.

You could potentially clone the system and then run it inside of a Virtual Machine, but it is possible that alone would break the application's license activation.
Well actually, one question...If I were to clone my internal drive onto an external SSD, couldn't I just plug that SSD into my (now upgraded) iMac and boot off of that whenever I wanted to use the Adobe apps? Isn't that how a cloned drive works?
 
Well actually, one question...If I were to clone my internal drive onto an external SSD, couldn't I just plug that SSD into my (now upgraded) iMac and boot off of that whenever I wanted to use the Adobe apps? Isn't that how a cloned drive works?
No, the computer is different, that alone will make many licensed applications stop working. Sometimes it is a MAC address, sometimes hard drive IDs, all kinds of things they use to invalidate licenses.

The chances of the old OS booting on new hardware is basically zero. On a system also running OSX, maybe, but it probably wouldn't be instantly happy and might require troubleshooting, which I can't say I have done with Mac OS. But then you would be in the same problem, that system is also old and prone to failure and additional loss of support.
 
Unknown about the iMac world, but in the Windows world, no.
It does not work like that.
Are you sure about that? I have been cloning Windows drives for years and never had problems to boot with them. Did it again last week for a colleague who were running W11 on a HDD (so it was unbearably slow). Cloned the drive on a NVMe with Clonezilla, booted first in safe mode and voila, new drive.

Never tried with a USB drive but I don't see why it wouldn't work. For sure you can do it with a fresh install (https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-run-windows-10-from-a-usb-drive).

I don't know about Macs though.