iCloud ‘Optimize Mac Storage’ breaks the Mojave installer

Yet another example of a really bizarre macOS bug that’s pretty inexcusable as a test escape, given it occurs with the default installation settings on a completely clean OS install. In short, the Mojave update installer does not work (on High Sierra at least) if you have ‘Optimize Mac Storage’ enabled for iCloud Drive (System… Read more

Full Disk Access is required to access Time Machine backups in Mojave

I’ve been struggling since Mojave came out to deal with it’s over-bearing expansion of SIP (“System Integrity Protection”), which is basically a super-root notion that blocks access – even to root – to lots of basic parts of the system, including obvious & mostly sensible ones like /System and /Library, but also less usefully things… Read more

tmutil is broken by SIP in Mojave

A diskutil bug unceremoniously erased an entire hard drive of mine a few weeks back.  While I was able to successfully (AFAICT) restore the drive’s contents to it from various backups, the erasure gave the drive a new identity (UUID, specifically).  The next time Time Machine ran, it compounded the diskutil bug by also unceremoniously… Read more

Creating a Fusion Drive from an existing disk, without erasing it

Photo of Phil Schiller on stage presenting Apple's Fusion Drive technology, at Apple's iPad Mini event on October 23rd, 2012.

Note: this guide was written circa macOS 10.13 High Sierra, in 2018. Its accuracy has not been verified for newer macOS releases. Curiously there’s very little information out on the web (at time of writing) on how to create (or expand) a Fusion Drive without erasing its contents first.  It’s entirely possible to do so… Read more