SOUND ON SOUND

[Howdy Doody Time]

Aye, with Windows you had to :)

CC

You're not wrong there! :)

[desmond]

Somehow you always manage to be the exception to the "it just works" thing... :headbang:

I think it's your super-secret special superpower..! ;)

[Mixedup]

Somehow you always manage to be the exception to the "it just works" thing... :headbang:

I think it's your super-secret special superpower..! ;)

There do seem to be an awful lot of exceptions to that.

[Howdy Doody Time]

Somehow you always manage to be the exception to the "it just works" thing... :headbang:

I think it's your super-secret special superpower..! ;)

Latest: Big Sur installed OK. The only thing I noticed was Nuendo 10 couldn't see my WiFi connection, everything else could. A few slightly flaky things happened, but no big deal.

Then I decided to revert back, and restore from a Time Machine backup I made before installing Big Sur.

Restoring has been going for half an hour, but not getting anywhere. There is a colourful spinning beach ball on screen, and a notice saying Time remaining : Calculating...
and a blue spot fixed at the beginning of a time rail. I think restore has crashed. The computer hasn't crashed because I can move the cursor, open a list of countries under a flag, bring up the recovery version tag screen, it's version 1.0 (428.0.1)

It's anyone's guess what happens if I interrupt Restoring, but this isn't right surely...

[Howdy Doody Time]

Well I had to reboot as restore had crashed. However rebooting from a blank disk still gave options, one was restore from time machine drive, (which had just failed) and another was re-install Big Sur. I chose to re-install Big Sur, which has worked. At least I have a blank canvas to reload key apps into.

I've no idea what went wrong, but it doesn't give me much confidence to back up more important Mac's. Is there a better option than Time Machine?

[desmond]

I don’t like Time Machine and clone my drives using SuperDuper.

[Howdy Doody Time]

I don’t like Time Machine and clone my drives using SuperDuper.

Noted. Thanks!

[Howdy Doody Time]

Unfortunately it seems super duper doesn't work with Big Sur. There is a very complicated work around involving two different apps and some sleight of hand, but that sound disastrous to me. Worse, there doesn't seem much prospect of getting around that apparently because Apple have closed the door to bootable external drives, and it has knock on effects for the way super duper works.

I'm happy with Big Sur except for one thing. My internal drive is 250 Gb SSD, which was enough for Parallels, Windows 10, Microsoft Office, Reason Suite 11, Nuendo 11, Band in a Box 2020, and a stack of Reason Rack Apps all under the previous OSX.

I just made a fresh install of Big Sur, and installed ONLY Reason Suite 11 with Rack Apps, and I have only 24.04 GB free !!!! Apparently there are 6 volumes sharing the 250.69 GB

211.6 GB are allocated to "Other Volumes" which I can't access. They are labelled Mackintosh HD (15.05GN), Mackintosh HD Data (red) (21.96 GB) , Mackintosh HD Data, (Orange) 186.61 GB) VM (1.07 GB) , PreBoot (586.9 MB) , 1 Not Mounted (1.37 GB), Free 24.04 GB

By the way, whereas you used to be able to click the HD icon and say get info - you can't do that now. You have to go to Disk Utility to get the bad news, in a format you don't understand.

That's hopeless to be honest, I'm going to retry restoring the previous setup. It takes an age, and if it isn't successful another age to get back to where I am now. Still as you know, I'm not unused to this kind of thing. You may not believe this but apart from computing woes, I'm a really lucky man, and I suppose there has to be some give and take :)

[desmond]

Unfortunately it seems super duper doesn't work with Big Sur. There is a very complicated work around involving two different apps and some sleight of hand, but that sound disastrous to me. Worse, there doesn't seem much prospect of getting around that apparently because Apple have closed the door to bootable external drives, and it has knock on effects for the way super duper works.

Yes, sorry, I read that a while back and did know about it but as I'm not on Big Sur I'm not committing everything around it to memory as it doesn't directly concern me yet. My comment stands though - I prefer to image the drive, rather than use Time Machine. But if that's no longer possible on future OS versions, you have to find other solutions for that case (which I haven't needed to do... yet.)

[BigRedX]

Somehow you always manage to be the exception to the "it just works" thing... :headbang:

I think it's your super-secret special superpower..! ;)

In the days when I was IT manager for a reasonably large design agency equipped with Macs throughout there were a couple of people who were like that. One of them was one of the studio managers, who was constantly complaining that there was something wrong with his Mac, and absolutely refused to believe that he might be the problem.

When I was faced with having to re-install everything on his Mac for the third time in less than 6 months I decided to put this to the test. I came in at the weekend when no-one else was working and swapped his Mac for another identical one from the other studio. I cloned the HD on the replacement Mac and copied the contents onto the studio manger's old Mac HD. I then did a full "write zeros" wipe of the replacement Mac HD and re-installed everything from scratch including setting up all the applications, just in case it there was a corrupted preferences file causing problems. I even went as far as to run his connection to the server via a different ethernet route.

Come Monday morning he had a different, but identical looking Mac (that had never caused any problems before) with a brand new install of the OS and all his apps, and one of the designers was now using his supposedly problematic old Mac. Within 3 months his replacement Mac was having problems again, whilst his previous one was still working fine with a different user.

There are some people that are simply not cut out for computer technology,

[desmond]

"Hmm, what is this weird "Library" folder? I don't want a library on my computer. Into the trash it goes!"

"Oh, what's this "System" folder now? I've got my own system, thanks very much, I don't want yours Apple. Into the trash it goes!"

"Ah, my computer won't start! For goodness sake, why can't Apple make a computer that *just works*..?"

:lol:

[Rich Hanson]

I used to work with a fellow where it appeared that electronics would just commit suicide the moment he walked in the room. It kept the hardware guy who maintained the test rig busy, at least.

[Howdy Doody Time]

"Hmm, what is this weird "Library" folder? I don't want a library on my computer. Into the trash it goes!"

"Oh, what's this "System" folder now? I've got my own system, thanks very much, I don't want yours Apple. Into the trash it goes!"

"Ah, my computer won't start! For goodness sake, why can't Apple make a computer that *just works*..?"

:lol:

:) well I do have a few Macs (currently Six in everyday use) and only one of them was problematic. Interestingly I passed a Mac Repair Shop on Saturday and I enquired about more memory for my i7 iMac which has been brilliant for me. I happened to mention the 2019 MBP and both engineers threw their hands up and warned me not to buy one!

The little MBAir has also been flawless until I upgraded to Big Sur - Heeding all the warnings about backing up first! but alas, that was no guarantee. I haven't given up on it though.

The only PC's I use are two iZ Radar Studios, and an old Sony Vaio Desktop with a 10 point touch sense screen - which is ideal for controlling X32 Rack via X32 Edit. - Never had a problem with any of those.

So however amusing it seems, I'm not the guy who breaks all my computers.

In a country where the mains is flaky, and there are many lightning storms, I asked for and received advice from this column, and bought the recommended non interruptible power supplies after damage to two digital mixing desks, and there have been no further problems (Thank You Dr. Robjohns) In fact thanks to everyone who responds to calls for help from people like me who use these things, but are not necessarily super savvy on the technical side, like Dr Sheldon Desmond for example. (who I have admired for years for his knowledge of Mac Computers and from whom a bit of ribbing is not a problem for me)

[Howdy Doody Time]

Turns out the space occupied by Big Sur is well known and discussed on the net. Between 35 and 45 GB apparently.

The problem is compounded by a combination of factors especially Time Machine. Time machine snapshots are undetectable except by Terminal, and can easily be placed on the internal boot drive. This may account for the large areas labeled "Mackintosh HD Data"

There are solutions which I will try today, including using terminal to report these snapshots, and then erase them.

[Howdy Doody Time]

For anyone finding this problem after upgrading to Big Sur try:

diskutil eraseVolume APFS Blank /dev/disk1s1


211.54 GB Free!!!

Voila!

But why does it have to be up to the customer to find this out?

I have a theory that most Mac users are geeks (I don't use the term derogatively) and enjoy this stuff as much as they enjoy using the apps. This makes for a user base that is OK with problems because they derive satisfaction from solving them. The web is packed with corroborative evidence for this theory, which is where I found my solution. Who amongst the non geek user base would have known about, understood, or even would have had enough savvy to know enough about the nature of the problem to have searched for the answer?