Thanks concerning recovery after an iMac hard drive failure; advice re its replacement and starting over

[petedaviesphotos]

Lightroom Version Number

CC

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

I was away from home last weekend, when my wife told me she was seeing a 'no -entry sign' when she tried to start our 5+ yr old iMac. It was hard to focus on my photography until my return that night...
After diagnosing a failed internal HD, miraculously I managed to coax it back to life, it has one of those much criticised fusion-drives and was now 'on borrowed time', the SSD fusion drive component is the same size as my camera SD card, 125GB!

Yet it has been enough to run the OS and key applications like LR/PS and just24 hrs later, I used your fabulous 'Lightroom, Moving Computers' to effect a recovery of sorts. It has allowed me to make some prints for a customer this week, I cannot thank you enough! Needless to say, I had been diligent in making backups of key LR components, although I did not find it easy to locate presets and camera raw components, and had to recover these from Time Machine backups instead.

Tomorrow, my iMac goes to 'hospital' for a new 1TB SSD. I shall have to repeat all the steps I took to recover function only a week ago, I'm hopeful with a superior internal HD performance will be even better than before. The old HD was running OS 10.13 High Sierra and things worked just fine. On recovering the SSD-fusion drive it would only offer OS 10.10 Yosemite or 10.15 Catalina. I went for the latter and it seems OK, although the iMac built-in slot to read SDs doesn't work and as I have not tested function much after only a few days, so I'm still a little nervous about Catalina...

I'd be grateful for any advice about
1. which OS to plump for - I'm thinking stick with Catalina, are any there any reasons not to?
2. Are there any expanded explanations on the forum concerning recovery of presets/downloaded profiles, so that I might recover these from my old Time Machine backups?
3. I appear to have got most of my backup strategy right, but must have made a few omissions - can anyone link me to threads that might take me closer to a 'sweet-spot' this time around please? I use the app SyncTime

Many thanks again, you really did save me!

 

[clee01l]

1. There is no OS version more recent than 10.15 Catalina . And there is no reason to retrograde your system.
2. TimeMachine will restore everything that you chose to backup using TimeMachine. There should be no need for additional instructions.
3. TimeMachine is your backup strategy. So I don't understand the #3 item. SyncTime just copies files from a source folder to a destination folder. It is not a backup

 

[petedaviesphotos]

1. There is no OS version more recent than 10.15 Catalina . And there is no reason to retrograde your system.
2. TimeMachine will restore everything that you chose to backup using TimeMachine. There should be no need for additional instructions.
3. TimeMachine is your backup strategy. So I don't understand the #3 item. SyncTime just copies files from a source folder to a destination folder. It is not a backup

Thanks Cletus, I thought Time Machine would work when I did my resurrection job last week, but it did not - maybe I can try that again when I have my new drive installed.

Catalina is still fresh and I can see several threads where people had encountered some issues, so I was looking for forum-user experiences to guide me.

 

[camner]

According to everything I have read, Catalina is buggier than Mojave. That said, I have not personally run into any major difficulties since upgrading from Mojave to Catalina. The only think I have found is that my 2015 iMac will no longer stay asleep, whether I manually put it to sleep or let it fall asleep itself. It wakes itself up after a few hours about 75% of the time. I can live with that, though it's annoying.

 

[clee01l]

Catalina is now at version 10.15.6 and most of the bugs have been chased down and I see no reason not to run Catalina.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[camner]

Tomorrow, my iMac goes to 'hospital' for a new 1TB SSD.

If your iMac is no longer under warranty (or AppleCare) any longer, I hope you are using an independent (non Apple) "hospital." If you go to the Apple Store and buy and have them install a 1TB SSD, that's going to set you back a very pretty penny. Buying your own 1TB SSD and getting an independent shop to install it should't be too bad.

Thanks Cletus, I thought Time Machine would work when I did my resurrection job last week, but it did not - maybe I can try that again when I have my new drive installed.

When you reinstall MacOS on your new drive, you should be prompted at some point in the process about whether you wish to migrate from a Time Machine backup. Assuming that your Time Machine backup is complete (that is, you did not exclude anything important from being backed up by Time Machine), selecting to migrate from a Time Machine backup will pull everything from your Time Machine backup.

BUT, and this is important...if, after resurrecting your machine and installing Catalina, you allowed Time Machine to do its thing, your latest Time Machine backup will NOT have everything that was on your iMac before the HD failed. If you want to go back to the state of your machine before the HD failure, you will need to choose the appropriate date when you are prompted about migrating from a Time Machine backup. This apple support doc talks about this.

 

[petedaviesphotos]

Thanks Camner, that may explain why Time Machine did not work last week. The 1TB SSD goes in today, will update on progress later, thanks all!