On that fateful day, Wed Mar 17th, I was so tired of telling my Mac “Try the OS update tomorrow”, I gave in and pressed the button to run the update! I have so much respect for and trust in Apple in terms of user experience that I expected such a major upgrade to proceed smoothly. It turned out to be a mini disaster.

It took forever to download, because it is a pretty large one. Then it began installing and long story short, after an hour and a half, nothing was happening. No error messages. I was using my phone to attend to emails in the meantime and looking up the various fora for Big Sur upgrades. So many complaints, I wish I had checked them before I began…

I then looked up the suggested solutions of trying to bring it up in safe mode, resetting the PVRAM etc. etc. I tried pretty much every key combination suggested here. I have no idea who comes up with these key combinations. For a long time, I have criticized the CTRL-ALT-DEL combination for Windows, but this set of keys, from Apple? You must be kidding. Try hitting the power button and quickly press Option-Command-P-R. Such a stressful exercise.

Every time I tried one of these, it is at least 15 to 30 minutes of waiting, only to see that none of them worked. I reluctantly contacted my staff, who had advised me earlier that I should wait because of an issue between Cisco VPN and Big Sur. But  a day earlier, I had heard from a colleague that they updated both the software and it was all working which was one of the reasons I was going for it!

My colleagues suggested the same key combinations and I tried them for several hours and gave up. Ha, may be I didn’t have enough disk space? Given that it is mighty Apple, I would have assumed that they check that I had more than what was needed before the installation. Regardless, I confirmed that this was not it, because I had plenty of disk space.

What’s next? Erase the contents of the disk and start over. This is always a nerve wracking step. I wanted my colleagues to check, double check and triple check that I had a solid backup. Despite the fact that I have most of my content on the cloud, there are some that I still had only on my local disk. After that confirmation, I was ready to format the disk and start a new installation, but, when I woke my Mac up, I saw a red battery. Though it was plugged in all along, it showed no juice in the battery. OK, time to take it to the Apple Store.

I was lucky to get an appointment on Thursday afternoon at the New Haven Apple Store and I took it there. The Genius at the store tried the same kind of key combinations that I had tried. To my surprise, a few of them presented him with different screens than when I did them at home. When I asked him, he said that they behave differently when connected to their Apple Store WiFi! Good to know, I thought I was doing something wrong. Anyways, no luck. I had to leave it overnight. And by the way, that red battery, apparently it was really not telling me that the battery was dead! Whatever…

It was ready on Friday, so I brought it back and eagerly began restoring my data. Frankly, I took time to bring down only what I really needed. And I had to reinstall all the different apps I needed. Everything was back to normal by Saturday morning.

All this time, I was fortunate to have a spare Mac to work with, so my work did not suffer. It is amazing that given the kind of disaster this is, I barely felt disrupted…

I am SO thankful that we offer desktop/laptop backup for all faculty and staff. It is such a valuable service and if you are a Wellesley faculty/staff and have opted out for one reason or the other, please consider reactivating it. It can be a life saver…

I know this is not the first time I have had issues with major OS upgrades in Mac. It is possible because I am not a regular user and have a ton of applications and data because I am also an active developer. This might be causing the kind of problems I have had. (I know, it is always my fault!)

So, the next time around, my solution is simple. Start afresh! Format the disk and install the OS, restore data and install apps. In the end this may be a more wise choice than doing the default installation.

I still feel that Apple can do a much better job in providing feedback on OS installations optionally (all the geeky stuff) to those who are technically savvy, so we can learn where it is getting stuck and see if we can remedy the issue…