Blue Swirl wrote:

The new Apple Devices app on Windows 10 currently gets the BlueSwirl Seal of Approval. It's always good to have another way to back up my data, but mainly because I can update my iPhone by connecting it to my computer. Which, yes, is less convenient that just updating the phone from its own settings, but is a nice dose of nostalgia for the days of the iPod.

My iPhone has so much storage these days (and cloud backups too) that I’ve completely forgotten what it’s like to plug it into the Mac.

My watch has stopped giving me message notifications and calendar doesn't seem to be syncing. Although health data does seem to be going back to the phone.

This has happened since the 14.7.1 update.

My watch is a SE and is on 9.6.3.

I'd avoided updating my watch to not fall foul of the Apple "your older hardware is now crap" syndrome but I fear I might be forced to update now.

Are there are any settings I can check on phone/watch before I (potentially) nuke my watch?

I've been reading a bit about this recently.  It does seem Apple has relaxed its rules a little.  I've downloaded this and a C64 emulator in the last few days, but I'm yet to get any ROMs onto the iPad to test them.

Tempting.

DS works well too, here’s a handy guide with handy links for getting the bios files installed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Delta_Emulator/comments/1c6zzu4/how_to_install_ds_bios/

Get you Mr. Moneybags!

Nice setup. The Mac mini is a wonderful machine. I've got the base M1 version, using it now as I type, and it still does everything I need it to after having it a few years.

Hurrah! Think I'm about there fixing all this now, and that's the first Back-up of everything on the new system completed, so I can breathe a little easier now.

So how did we get here?
Switched on the iMac in my office last Friday morning and after a couple of minutes it went phut and died, tripping the entire ring of socket in my flat.
Restored power to the sockets and yes, the iMac was stone dead.
Not hugely surprising given what an aging piece of shit it was, but the irony was I'd been going to replace it this week anyway. Should have done it last week, but there's always something comes up and pushes your plans back, so hell mend me.
Mercifully, there's a 2TB SSD connected to it for Time Machine, and I'd done a back-up literally the night before, so assuming this had worked, I would be able to restore everything to a new machine.
For context though, this machine contains my entire digital life. I run my business from it, so it has about twenty years of business records on it, plus the small matter of my absolutely massive music collection amassed over a lifetime, and my huge digital photo collection. If this is all irretrievable then I might as well just walk into the sea.

This was fucking chaos. I'm just up. I have to pack and leave for Aberdeen at lunchtime because I'm on the road all weekend, and the clock is ticking.

So, off to the The Apple Store I dash.
Explain to the nice young lady in there what's happened and we go through my options, because I need to be back in business by Monday...
Alright, give me the Mac Mini Pro, but put a 1TB SSD in it and double the RAM.
Sure. You can have that in about three weeks Sir.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Why so long?
We have to order it specially for you, because we don't stock one with those specs Sir.
Can't you swap the hard drive and add the RAM in the shop now?
No Sir. Nothing in these machines is serviceable now. You have to order it with what you want, and then that's what you have for its lifetime.
So wait? If I buy the one you actually stock? I can't actually even add more RAM to it later?
No Sir. Not any more. What you buy is what you live with.
Wow! I'm really fucked here amn't I? Do you have anything in this store that has a 1TB SSD drive in it?
Yes. You could buy this Mac Studio Pro!
How much is that?
It's four thousand two hundred pounds Sir.
*disgusted look* I don't think I'll be taking that one thank you...

So we dance around my options, and decide that if I buy the Mac Mini Pro which comes with a 512gig SSD, I can also buy an external 1TB SSD to piggy back off it, and theoretically when I do the restore from the Time Machine back-up, I can tell it to put my music and photos on the external drive, because they'll be to big to go on the internal drive. 
It's a solid plan, and frankly it's my only option to get back in business by Monday. The only worry is it's going to involve more Time Machine fuckery than I'd prefer to be dealing with, but I'll have all weekend to plan it out in my head how I'm going to achieve all this.

I buy the Mac Mini Pro, the Apple Studio Display, a 1Tb SSD, a new Magic Mouse and Keyboard, and that'll be three and a half thousand pounds please Sir.
Fuck me! When did this all get so fucking expensive? This is about twice as much as it used to cost me to do this. Thank Christ it's a business expense and I can write it off!

So I give them the moolah, they give me the goods, I pick the brains of one of their Geniuses for a bit, get back in the car, drive home, fling all the new stuff into the office, avoid the temptation to open anything, and get back in the car and head off to Aberdeen.

I spend the weekend stewing over all this, but it's good because it does give me a couple of days to plan my strategy for when I get back on Sunday evening.

FAST FORWARD

It's Sunday evening. I'm back home, and have just assembled everything.
I switch it on with the 1TB SSD, and the 2TB SSD containing the back-up of the old machine, and Migration Assistant launches and asks me if I'd like to Migrate everything from my old Mac or a Time Machine Back-up? 
Hurrah!
Now the big worry here was going to be the size of the libraries I'm restoring, versus the size of the internal disk, because that new 1TB SSD might be attached, but it hasn't been reformatted yet, so there's going to have to be a cunning plan here.

Mercifully when I go through the check list on Migration Assistant of what I want to restore, I can just get everything on it except my Photo Library, and that will be the internal drive virtually full.
So the plan is to restore everything except the Photo Library to the Internal Drive on the Mac, then format the external drive, move my Music Library onto the External Drive, then once again access the old Time Machine Back-up, and restore my Photo Library from there onto the External Drive.
It's a bit of digital juggling I'd rather not do, but it means if it all works, then the internal drive on the mac Mini becomes the business machine, and all my digital libraries will live on the external drive.

Let's at this point cut an already long and tedious story shorter.
The plan works.
I'm surprised how fast and easy the process is (Apple have always excelled at this sort of user friendliness tbh), and within an hour, everything is where it need to live.
RESULT!
There's hours of fuckery this morning of course, making everything point at where it need to, so it all works, and I have to buy a new copy of MS Office because it's a new machine, but everything is there, everything is updated. All my emails. All my passwords. All my business stuff. Everything that crosses your mind could be another hurdle to being back in business. It's all there. It's now all in the right places, and it all (seemingly) works.

AND EXHALE...

I pop back round to The Apple Store this afternoon and return the new Keyboard and Magic Mouse which I won't need for the immediate future, and instead buy yet another 2TB external SSD and a few cables that are the missing links for one or two peripherals. This SSD will be attached to the Mac Mini as my new Time Machine Drive, and a nice Apple Genius takes the time to explain to me how I need to set-up Time Machine to get it to simultaneously back-up the multiple drives that now constitute my new Mac ecosystem.
Nice chap. Very helpful.

Back home again. Set up the latest SSD as the new Time Machine Drive. Perform the first back-up of everything, and BINGO! I think the nightmare might be finally over.

So I guess the moral of the story is, if you're planning on buying a new computer system. Don't keep putting it off!

...and always back-up everything.

Yeah, the new system I have is lovely, but I do suspect that Jobs must be spinning in his grave at their current unified architecture, which really is taking built in obsolescence to it's Orwellian conclusion. A truly rancid design decision.
Still, I do love their ecosystem, and it's ease of use for the computer illiterate like me. I've been Mac for thirty years now, so it would be madness to switch out of it now.

I might increase my iCloud Storage Plan and back up my business files to the iCloud as a Brucie Bonus to all the hard drives. I currently just have a wee 50gig plan for my Mac Mail, and I do resent the though of giving them any more money than I need to, but it's worth considering as a double double back-up option.

Also considering getting a MacBook Air as a 2nd machine now. Would probably suit me better than a new iPad.

Those Apple monitors sound fantastic for colour repro.
I would advise also having an offsite backup - either up in the cloud or even just a backup hdd/ssd stored somewhere else.

One thing you may or may not notice G is the pristine rendering of fonts and UI elements above your big standard 4K monitor. Basically the way Mac OS scales is better on a 5K screen (due to maths). I can’t say as I’ve noticed it but for some people it’s quite apparent that there is a quality drop on 4K.

Heh. It’s definitely on the to do list somewhere
Tomorrow is Domain Registry renewal day, so I’ll need to keep an eye on that in case it goes tits up.

Not so much rare, than they cause bemusement in the young that such a product even exists in 2024, and is apparently still available in Apple Stores.

Optical drive.

I had to look it up. One of these new music disk things is it? Play the hit parade on it yes?

Are you not concerned about the weight of the monitor on the super drive?