BigSur App OSX file reduced to 27.5MB - Downloaded from Self Service

syed28257
New Contributor

Hi,

I was trying to upgrade my mac os to Bigsur. I try to download the OSX app file from self service. After downloading the osx file size shows 27.5MB. whereas the actual size is 12.26GB

With this 27.5MB file, I am able upgrade the OS to BigSur without any error and it is working fine. Is this the expected behaviour or ?

(Devices are managed through Jamf)

1 REPLY 1

MrRoboto
Contributor III

This is a "stub" file that gets downloaded from the App Store. Once you run this file it will download the full installer content in the background. To deploy or cache the full installer you will want to download it using the terminal command. This can be done directly on client computers via a script policy. Or you can download it on your computer and then package and deploy using Jamf.

How to Download Full MacOS Installer from Mac Command Line Launch the Terminal application as usual, then use the following command syntax, replacing “..” with the installer version you wish to download: softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version .. Hit return to start downloading the full installer application of that version of MacOS Remember to replace ..* with the version you want to download, for example to download the full macOS Catalina installer the syntax would be: softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.15 The downloaded installer application of MacOS will appear in the /Applications directory of MacOS, just as if you had downloaded the installer from the Mac App Store or Software Update control panel.