{"id":29952,"date":"2020-08-31T15:59:44","date_gmt":"2020-08-31T19:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=29952"},"modified":"2020-09-02T13:01:06","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T17:01:06","slug":"is-macos-becoming-unmaintainable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/31\/is-macos-becoming-unmaintainable\/","title":{"rendered":"Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/eclecticlight.co\/2020\/08\/26\/how-can-you-rebuild-or-repair-an-apfs-volume-group\/\">Howard Oakley<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/eclecticlight.co\/2020\/08\/26\/how-can-you-rebuild-or-repair-an-apfs-volume-group\/\">\n<p>There&rsquo;s one big snag with Catalina&rsquo;s ingenious linkage of System and Data volumes into a Volume Group: when anything goes wrong, the only option seems to be to wipe them both and start again. I&rsquo;ve heard of a steady succession of users who&rsquo;ve been caught by this, most commonly when trying to re-install earlier releases of Catalina.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Apple doesn&rsquo;t provide a full suite of maintenance and repair tools for APFS and its volumes. Third-parties have been prevented from doing so because Apple has still not provided documentation more than a year after developers first started using macOS Catalina. All this changes again with the arrival of Big Sur and its Sealed System Volume, where the contents of the system are contain in a special snapshot which is cryptographically sealed and mounted read-only. I can see a lot of users having to perform repeated clean re-installs of macOS 11.0 because there are simply no other options.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/eclecticlight.co\/2020\/08\/30\/last-week-on-my-mac-is-macos-becoming-unmaintainable\/\">Howard Oakley<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=24324639\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/eclecticlight.co\/2020\/08\/30\/last-week-on-my-mac-is-macos-becoming-unmaintainable\/\">\n<p>Apple has long taken pride that &ldquo;it just works&rdquo;, but seems to have convinced itself that is inviolate fact, and has become unable to consider what happens when it stops working.<\/p>\n<p>The long-running saga of failed EFI firmware updates is a case in point.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Indications are that Catalina&rsquo;s boot Volume Group was designed without consideration of maintenance procedures which could address that type of problem, and the current solution has only evolved during Catalina&rsquo;s release cycle, in the last few months.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Once again, no one seems to have considered the problems which can be caused by orphaned snapshots, so they&rsquo;re a key macOS feature which is essentially unmaintainable by macOS and its supporting toolset.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p id=\"is-macos-becoming-unmaintainable-update-2020-09-02\">Update (2020-09-02): See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/atp.fm\/393\">Accidental Tech Podcast<\/a> (John&rsquo;s Mac Pro Tale of Woe).<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Howard Oakley: There&rsquo;s one big snag with Catalina&rsquo;s ingenious linkage of System and Data volumes into a Volume Group: when anything goes wrong, the only option seems to be to wipe them both and start again. I&rsquo;ve heard of a steady succession of users who&rsquo;ve been caught by this, most commonly when trying to re-install [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-08-31T19:59:48Z","apple_news_api_id":"a5c02106-de54-4500-ab4a-0fa79e8b5d2e","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-09-02T17:01:10Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ApcAhBt5URQCrSg-nnotdLg","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1395,1607,131,30,652,1666,216],"class_list":["post-29952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-apple-file-system-apfs","tag-apple-t2","tag-bug","tag-mac","tag-mac-pro","tag-macos-10-15","tag-timemachine"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29952"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29979,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29952\/revisions\/29979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}