Tag Archives: iCloud

Friday the 13th

9 Mar

A day before the ominous Friday the 13th in December last year, my MacBook Air crashed and died. I never saw it coming although there were tell tale signs of instability after installing MacOS Catalina 10.15.1 a few weeks earlier. I caved in and updated because of iTunes and my iPhone XR. To cut a long story short, I had to update the OS in order to have the latest version of iTunes that could sync with the iPhone XR. Otherwise, I could not back up my phone, something that I don’t do that often.

So all was fine and dandy except a few small matters like several of the softwares. The Adobe and Microsoft softwares that I have—essential but not critical—could no longer be used because the versions I have were not supported with the 10.15.1 OS. But since I hardly use those softwares these days and I could back up my iPhone XR, this was all that mattered I rationalized.

On that faithful eve of the ominous day, I had my Skype launched and ready to have the weekly session with M1. Suddenly, the app was acting up and I had to restart the laptop. Several times in fact. A prompt came up and caught my eye – the OS needed to be updated with Catalina 10.15.2.

Reflecting back the several instances of instability and the recent wonky behavior of Skype, I thought perhaps it was best to update the OS. Bad idea, really bad, bad idea.

The laptop could not install the OS and hung several times. A black screen kept appearing with each restart. Uh oh. Even with Global Network Recovery and all the steps I could find online could not save my MacBook! Oh no….

The next day, Friday the 13th I went to Machines, a local authorized Apple reseller to see what could be done. To my dismay, Machines no longer provided support for older devices. Oh no! The apprehension of this ominous day struck.

My 11” MacBook Air is a 2012 model and deemed a vintage device and as such, do not qualify for further technical support. I was advised then to go to a third party repair shop. Do I have a choice at that point?

So off to a third party repair shop I went. Thankfully, these guys fixed the problem (they took a few days though) and I also had all my data recovered for an additional fee. Phew. My MacBook Air is now downgraded to MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 and should remain at this version for optimum performance.

But less than a month after that, the laptop acted up again resulting in the decision to do a total reformat. This was after backing up all the recovered data to an external drive. So so problematic.

While updates are good, it does not necessarily add value to older devices. One should be cautious before doing so, otherwise be prepared for some stress of losing data and then a little hole in the pocket to fix the damage and retrieve the precious.

Hopefully nothing disastrous will happen to my laptop on this ominous date this coming Friday. And I have since been backing up my iPhone XR on iCloud.

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Treasures Found

9 Jan

With M2 and her cousin in my office, I was kept busy. During their first two weeks, I shared with them some basic graphic design knowledge just so they understand what we really do. Hubby, for his part, taught them office administrative duties. Then the next two weeks, both girls worked on emptying my store room that has accumulated twenty years’ of printed work! Along the way, they found some treasures: photos from the pre-digital era!

Oh. My. God. Such classics – our wedding photo, M1 when she was a toddler, bad hair days captured in time, the twins when they were young, my Dad. The two girls certainly had a good laugh over these antiques while I was pleasantly surprised they found them.

It made me realize we should make a stronger effort to take better care of printed photographs. Not only that, we should have some favorite pictures framed and put on display to remind us of the treasured moments. Otherwise it will be forgotten.

As we are now in the digital age, a lot of moments are captured but never printed. They are then stored in a mobile device, hard drive, computer or iCloud and hardly looked at again. It is always put off for when we ‘have time’ to do so.

Think about it, how often do you find yourself scrolling or searching your device looking for that one particular treasured moment? Sometimes you cannot even find it from the thousands of photos stored! How would someone else know what treasures you store in the photo album of your device? Nobody knows except you. This whole scenario makes me rethink my life in all the photos captured digitally.

It was a good decision then to have them clean out the store room for we may have totally lost these forgotten classic photos.

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