You can also get macOS installers from the App Store, but presumably you already tried that with Big Sur and that didn’t work in this situation.ĭo you have another method to re-download macOS Big Sur? Let us know in the comments. Once you have the installer app you can use it to create a boot disk, bootable USB drive, make an ISO, copy it to another Mac, or do whatever else you were planning on doing with it.Īnother option is to use a third party tool like MDS to download complete macOS installers, including Big Sur, but if you’re looking for a quick option that doesn’t require any additional apps, the command line is fairly simple.įor what it’s worth, you can also use the use the softwaredate –fetch-full-installer flag to download macOS installers of other versions too, but obviously that’s beyond the scope of this article but you can read about that if interested. The complete installer appears in the Applications folder, just like it would if you were updating an older macOS version.

Open the /Applications folder on the Mac to find the macOS Big Sur installer application.

You’ll see a “Scanning for installer” message soon followed by a percentage indicator of the download, when finished downloading you’ll see “Install finished successfully”.Open the Terminal application (hit command+Spacebar and type Terminal, then hit return, or launch it directly from Utilities).Assuming you’re currently on a Mac running Big Sur (11.0 or later) here is all you need to do: Then I thought of installing through startup menu using a USB drive but I ended up having a screen showing my a circle with and below a web url to restore.

The simplest and most reliable way to redownload macOS Big Sur directly from macOS Big Sur is by using the command line. Recently the new Big Sur 11.1 firmware update was released and my MacBook is unable to install it after downloading, which I tried several times. Re-downloading macOS Big Sur from a macOS Big Sur Mac

Not to worry, as it’s easy to download macOS Big Sur from macOS Big Sur by using the command line as we’ll show you.

Install macos big sur