Absolutely. I just installed a Seagate Backup Plus
appliance before messing with my Mac and there is the last catalina
installation fully backed up but nothing is McCormick-proof and
somehow, I have deleted something important when I wiped the
system down to the almost bare metal because that was my final
option from Apple since none of the back door root accesses work
any more.
One is supposed to erase their main Mackintosh hd drive
when they plan to sell their Mac or if they are psychic and know
that their house is going to be burgled that night, etc.
I erased Macintosh hd and Macos system which is a small
volume although I think I lucked out in that it doesn't erase
since the button is greyed out on that drive.
When I go to recovery mode, there are 2 options in the
disk table Macos and Macintosh HD.
I tell it to restore the catalina to Macintosh HD and
immediately, it pops me to a message stating that I am not
restoring to a full set and I click OK but like all really stupid
software, it doesn't tell me what was missing.
Good software at least hints at what isn't there but
should be.
Really smart software doesn't let you stray in to an
un-recoverable situation without at least a warning but I am here
because of the consequences of somebody's not figuring out what
is possible and mechanically avoiding it in the first place.
That is aggravating because the software has to know what
it just tried to do and couldn't so why not share that bit of
gold with those of us who don't work in an Apple store or for
Apple and do these rebuilds every day.
All this erasing, puzzling and hours of disruption is
over a single unix command
rm "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/var/db/.AppleSetupDone"
The agent at Apple told me to run this command from the
terminal in recovery mode.
As I said before, the terminal doesn't appear as a
dropdown menu item if you're not the admin and one needs it to
clear that one file.
The system, on reboot, is supposed to look for this empty
file and, if not found, have the user setup an account. Yes, I
know. You already have an account. The utility that runs is a
spiffy version of adduser, an old command-line unix utility that
creates new accounts.
In this case, the account is an administrative account so
you can actually make changes to your system. After you
successfully created your account, the utility creates that empty
file so nobody else can do this maliciously later.
If nobody is in charge, nobody can ever do this without
starting from scratch.
This is the main reason against upgrading. There are now
just too many locks and bars. The system is it's own death trap.
Martin
John Panarese <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
This is why I preach backing up your system. I can’t emphasize the************
importance of a good backup strategy. If something goes south, you have
options to recover or go back.
Take Care
