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6 February 2023

Friday is a busy day around here. We had worked into the night Thursday to get our slide show in shape but it was so late we hadn't done even a simple backup before closing up shop. We were tempting the Fates.

This time they were not having it. On a rushed Friday morning, we read about XProtect Remediator 89, Apple's latest silent security update. We launched Howard Oakley's Silent Knight to see if it had been installed and when we saw it hadn't, we told Silent Knight to get on with it.

The Fates snickered at us and installed Ventura 13.2 on our unsupported MacBook Pro (Mid 2010) 6,1. And, as before, the poor box was unable to boot.

We had learned last month that the only cure is to erase the disk, reinstall Monterey (which works with root patches installed by the OpenCore Legacy Patcher) and use Migration Assistant (without the root patches) to restore our data from our most recent Time Machine backup.

Migration Assistant takes about 10 hours to do that over a USB connection. So our main production box would be out of service all Friday.

Did we curse the Fates?

Did we miss a beat? Did we lose the slide show? Did we curse the Fates?

We cursed the Fates as we disconnected our FireWire card reader cable and plugged it into our backup box, connecting the two machines. We rebooted the production box (which wouldn't even boot off a USB connected drive) in Target mode where it mounted on the backup box's Desktop.

We copied the slide show edits over and backed up a few things we knew weren't on our most recent network backup (like February email) before erasing the drive with Disk Utility.

At that point we could boot from the USB OpenCore installer, so we did that. Installing Monterey from the USB thumbdrive takes a while, so we made a list of the restore operation so we didn't skip anything.

We drive over to Mom's to maker her a hot lunch every day, so we packed up the backup box and left the bunker as Monterey installed.

We published the slide show from the backup box and worked on the matinee at Mom's. Mom was having a bad day, requiring a call to her doctor and the inevitable wait for a response so we didn't get back to the bunker for a while.

When we did get back, we ran Migration Assistant on the MacBook Pro, letting it go overnight.

When we got up Saturday morning, we put up the Horn and matinee from the backup box before we returned to the MacBook Pro. We did our manual updates of email and a few other things before testing our PHP, MySQL, Apache, Perl, ImageMagick and ExifTool installations. They had all been restored.

And, just to protect us from our own foolishness, we deleted Silent Knight.


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