Followup to "A Quick Restorative"

Just a quick followup to the previous entry. Since I made those comments about resource forks not being backed up I've had reason to rethink. The reason I thought they were not being backed up up was that MS Office 2004 stopped working with an error about a broken Carbon shared library. I naively assumed this was a resource fork issue, but it turned out that erasing and re-installing Office didn't fix the problem. Plus, other native Carbon apps stopped working with the same error. Oddly, Eclipse and other SWT apps, which use the Carbon API, were OK.

So, I had to bite the bullet and do what the Apple technical docs say, and do a system reinstall to fix Carbon. I was so not happy about doing this — in Windows this is just a world of pain, plus I was just about to go overseas on holiday and rebuilding the system just before a long trip sounded like an insane thing to do. But the "archive and reinstall" option that OS X has sounded straightforward, and I could always restore from backup, so off I went.

Despite my trepidation, it went unbelievably well. I took the opportunity to not install all languages and printer drivers this time, which gave me back a few GB of disk as a bonus. Then re-installing OS updates cost a couple of hundred MB of download, but I had a fixed, working system, including Carbon apps in about 2 hours. And everything else about the system, except the development tools and my UI customisation haxies migrated across.