Monday, September 25, 2017

Spending a lot of time reinstalling everything after a clean install without even the option to restore from Time Machine backups directly. I will tell, Apple, I will tell!

Fedora 26 boot partition

Installed Fedora 26 on partition. Checked that I can boot it either natively or in VMware. I reused the existing VMware paritition configuration file, just had to recreate the physical disk with:

cd /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library
./vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 PhysicalLinuxPartitions 4,6 lsilogic

Partition 4 is the Linux EFI boot partition (I was not feeling confident enough to reuse the existing EFI parittion that macOS uses to boot). Partition 6 is the ext4 partition.

It is important not to add the .vmdk extension in the physical disk name, otherwise you end up with PhysicalLinuxPartitions.vmdk.vmdk.

Windows 10 boot partition

This is new, but I decided to also have a Windows 10 boot partition on the machine, to have convenient access to Visual Studio.

No real problem here. I installed with Bootcamp, the process is quite smooth, and VMware then has a "create VM from Bootcamp" option.

Mail reconfiguration

Mostly transparent. I recovered my mail accounts directly, except for the Red Hat one for some reason. I see the corresponding folder in my mail sidebar, but when I send email to myself from another account, I never get it. Weird.

Also, all my mail rewrite rules seem to be pointing to nowhere land. Since I don't see my mail archives for internal Red Hat email, at least that's consistent. But I don't remember how I put them there.

Software installations

It's just amazing how much software you need to restore to bring a system back to working state.

It's also amazing how much useless crud accumulates on a hard disk when you are not looking. Before reinstallation, I had roughly 17GB free on my disk. Which is way low on a 400G partition. Now, having restored a working environment, I still have 295GB free.

What's missing?

• I have not restored my iTunes music yet, that's about 20G.
• There were apparently around 50G of iPhone backups. I did not restore that. If I need them, they're on the backup disk. That's a lot of space for little value. I don't recall resorting to my backup when I installed my last phone. So space wasted for nothing.
• The various {tt "Library/Mail{tt " folders (there's a few of them in my backups, as Apple kept moving things around). That totalled over 40G, and apparently, it's mostly a local cache. That happens to be replicated, I have a V2, a V3 and a V4 in my folder??? Got rid of all of it, and happily reading my mail

At the end of my day, I have a working laptop with VPN, 3 bootable partitions with three different operating systems, the ability to run the two additional partitions systems as macOS VMs.