It’s appears a bit ironic that as I prepare for my foray into Windows that my wife decided to upgrade to a MacBook Pro. However, It’s not ironic at all: I’ve never claimed the new Mac’s aren’t great consumer devices. However, setting up this new machine has exposed a weakness I’ve long suspected.
All I wanted to do was to restore her TimeMachine backup onto the new laptop. It failed. Horribly. The setup process showed my TimeMachine drive and claimed there was no valid backup there. It was simply not possible. Panic. Fortunately, we still had her old machine or we would have lost everything. I was able, through trial and error, to recreate her backup that was usable. Hours later, I was able to start the restore process.
What’s so frustrating is that backing up to a TimeMachine used to be one of the crown jewels of “The Mac Way”. A horribly geeky process was made painless. It just worked. It was something that Apple proudly and completely owned compared to other systems.
Yet they’ve slipped, it’s an incredible testament of the general neglect of the MacOS platform (don’t get me started on file sharing) that such things that were rock solid are now nightmares (If you don’t believe me, just Google “timemacine backup failed”)
This is one of the reasons I’m willing to try this move to Windows. Mac no longer “just works” like it used to. It’s not feeling like I’m leaving that much behind.