Your Nerd Brother-in-Law on OS X El Capitan and the Necessity of having a back-up clone

Welcome, Apple fan men and women. This is the Editor of the MacValley Blog, whom you may refer to as “someone’s nerd brother-in-law”. And I am going to give you my thoughts about OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

 

My own experience has been positive. The apps essential to my workflow worked:

 

1. Quicken 2007. I would suggest you install the latest updates.
2. MacJournal 6. Works fine.
3. Microsoft Office 2011. Works fine. 
4. MarsEdit 3.7.1 which I used to write this post.

I depend on those programs daily. I’ll report on the apps I don’t use that often.

Now from reports, the biggest show-stopped bug occurred in Office 2016 for Mac, Microsoft’s marquee app. Users flooded user forums with reports that MS Office 2016 for Mac kept crashing on them.

From what I’ve read, Microsoft acknowledges they have a problem with Office 2016 for Mac and they don’t know when they’ll have it fixed.

This sounds like one of those bugs that just drives programmers nuts. Please, if Office 2016 displays buggy behavior, give MS all the information they request. What looks like gibberish to you might contain the nuggets of data necessary to fix the problems. Our fights with MS involve their upper management (Ballmer, in particular) and not some unknown programmer tearing their hair out over a bug that happens only to some people occasionally. A rogue variable whose value someone forgot to define, probably.

In the meantime, I hope you made backups of OS X 10.10 Yosemite. I refer to both the backups done by Time Machine in the background automatically and to making a clone of your Mac’s main hard drive or SSD. If you haven’t made a clone of your hard drive before, I strongly urge you to do so. Right now. Certainly before you commit to overwriting your current installation of OS X 10.10, 10.9 , 10.8, 10.7 or even 10.6. Do it! 

 

Here are the instructions from TutsPlus about making a clone with Super-Duper!, my cloning app of choice.

Here are the instructions from TutsPlus about making a clone with Carbon Copy Cloner, another great cloning app. 

They both have trial periods, so download both of them and try them out.

 

Download Super-Duper from here. 

Download Carbon Copy Cloner from here 

 

Senior Correspondent Arnold Woodworth has always told us OS X isn’t really ready until version 10.x.3 arrives. I would advise you strongly to have that clone ready. Practice booting from it.  

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog