How iCloud could save your Mac from El Capitan’s destruction

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The cloud service that often lets people down saved me from catastrophe.
Apple's often unreliable cloud service sure saved me from a potential catastrophe.
Photo: Apple

As you may have heard, Apple released the public beta for OS X El Capitan yesterday. Since I tend to ignore the risks of beta software in favor of all the new features, I downloaded it on my mid-2011 MacBook Air. Do yourself a favor: don’t be like me. Understand and acknowledge the risks of beta software. It’ll save you time and data.

Luckily right before I downloaded, I moved some files and folders from local storage into iCloud Drive. A few weeks prior, I conveniently decided to upgrade to the 200GB storage option for $3.99 per month. I didn’t back up anything from my Mac either because I live on the edge, but I am fully invested in the Apple/iCloud ecosystem.

Once El Capitan finished downloading, it prompted me to restart my computer and begin the installation. Probably only a minute or two after the installation began, I got a message that read “File system verify or repair failed.” I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant but by the looks of it I knew it couldn’t be good. The only option here was to “Restart and try again” so I did. I had no luck after four or five additional attempts.

Then I decided to just give up on installing El Capitan and revert back to Yosemite in Recovery Mode. This time, I got a different error message that said “An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.” I was officially stuck in OS X limbo. El Capitan wouldn’t install and my Mac wouldn’t let me revert back to Yosemite.

Off to the Genius bar I go carrying the weight of my anxiety with me. Sure enough, the genius who took care of me told me he would need to perform a clean install of Yosemite, thus wiping everything out. I nonchalantly agreed because I knew it was either that or live with a paperweight for a laptop.

I’m not as unlucky as most people who don’t back up their computers. My investment in Apple and iCloud is what seriously saved me from a painful amount of data loss. When I got home and turned on my like-new MacBook Air, I found that just logging into iCloud restored around 80 percent of everything I had. My most important files were waiting for me in iCloud Drive, all my notes, reminders and calendars were ready, photos were in iCloud Photo Library, music was all available in iCloud Music Library (thanks Apple Music, you were just in time) and even my bookmarks and passwords were there in Safari.

time_machine_image

There are two lessons to be learned here. First, dedicate yourself as much as possible to Apple’s ecosystem. It’ll pay off in situations like this. Keep your music, photos and important files in iCloud. This shouldn’t be too difficult since you’re likely to want to access all of those on multiple devices anyway. If calendars, notes, reminders, bookmarks and saved passwords are also important to you, sync those too. Mail already lives on the Internet so that’s not of huge concern.

If you’re like me, insisting that you don’t need to back up your Mac, the second lesson is for you: back up your Mac, or at least store files externally. Whether you upgrade your iCloud storage or buy an external drive is up to you, just as long as your important files don’t live solely on one machine.

Of course I did lose the files I stored locally, but none of them were anything I desperately needed. Within about an hour, my computer looked as if nothing ever changed. I’m still in shock now thinking about it. Even five years ago if I had to get my hard drive wiped, I would have lost almost all of my files without a backup. It’s astounding how iCloud was able to automatically restore just about everything meaningful to me.

Ultimately, don’t trust beta software (especially beta operating systems like El Capitan) and always have a little healthy skepticism about stable software, too. Let iCloud store what it can and back up the rest.

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