I haven't installed beta 1 of macOS Big Sur on my Macs. But I do have a way to run it anyway. I installed it on an external drive. But not just any external drive. A spinning HD would be too slow. A USB thumb drive would be too problematic. So I created a small, inexpensive external SSD drive. Installing Big Sur on this external drive is tricky. Basically, you boot into Recovery Mode, and then choose to install Catalina on the blank external drive instead of "restoring" the internal drive. Once that is done, you boot to the external drive and finish the setup. Then I installed the Big Sur beta 1 "Profile" on it from the Apple Developers site. In the future, you'll be able to do the same with the public beta "Profile." Then I just let the system on that external drive update to Big Sur. All this time, the normal internal SSD on my MacBook Pro remained untouched. So I can just boot my MacBook Pro and nothing has changed. But if I want to look at Big Sur and test things out, I just connect this external drive, hold down Option during a restart, and choose to boot from the external. Shut down and reboot without the external to return to normal operation with my internal drive and Catalina. Here are the two products I used to create the external SSD for $64. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZGK3K4V/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Silicon Power 256GB - NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4 2280 TLC SSD </a> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MNFH1PX/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME PCI-E M-Key Solid State Drive External Enclosure</a> As I point out in the long (too long, sorry) video, an external drive like this is much better suited for running macOS, as opposed to a cheap USB thumb drive, which is fine for storage and transfers, but not for active read+write constant access. Even better would be a Thunderbolt 3 case/adaater instead of USB 3.1. That would be faster, but more expensive and also impossible to access on a computer without Thunderboth 3.
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