- Joined
- Sep 30, 2007
- Messages
- 9,962
- Reaction score
- 1,236
- Points
- 113
- Location
- The Republic of Neptune
- Your Mac's Specs
- 2019 iMac 27"; 2020 M1 MacBook Air; macOS up-to-date... always.
Time and time again, Onyx has proven to be an essential tool. So I've been having nagging issues with Ventura on my 2019 iMac ever since I upgraded to it from Monterey. I waited until 13.1 was released, then jumped straight to that. Ever since, I've had error messages after coming up from rebooting, saying the the system was restarted due to a problem (no... no there wasn't), as well as a failure to connect to my Time Capsule for reading old backups. It would work once in a while, but usually would only show backups dating to the first of the year. That last bit was really odd because I did the update mid-December and have backups from the end of the year. If this was a Ventura issue, surely it would have been ongoing since the upgrade? I've been able to inspect those backups using TinkerTool System to make sure they are actually on there and not just local snapshots and all seemed well. My primary concern was that the TC was failing, or possibly the older backups corrupted somehow, but I did have issues with backups on Catalina that were eventually resolved, so I did have that in mind.
So yesterday I decide to get serious about this, with the expectation that I may have to clean reinstall Ventura. NOT an easy task. I first installed Monterey to an external drive and booted from that repeatedly just to validate that the system was fine and would not claim there was a problem. Success. So I'm not looking at an impending hardware failure. I was back to Ventura to change the default startup disk when I clicked into SteerMouse by mistake (which installs as a System Preference) and got an alert that there was an update. OH HOH! I'm behind by 3 or 4 point updates! So I update that, but the problem with restart errors persisted. I then ran Onyx to purge the caches, rebuild Spotlight, etc etc. And Holy Freaking Cow! Not only did the "restart error" problem go away, but my Time Capsule is now routinely showing me my entire backup history going to 2020, and just to be sure... I successfully recovered a long-deleted app from 2020.
I'm not surprised that Onyx cleared up the restart error problem. I thought I had tried running Onyx once already, but maybe I hadn't. Or maybe SteerMouse being on a version not fully compatible with Ventura was the root of the issue, with a cache cleanup after updating it being needed also. I'm not sure. But fixing the Time Capsule issue? I can only guess that Ventura was struggling to connect for some reason due to some caching issue. I just don't know. I was having the same problem just with the Time Capsule problem on my MBA also and in this case, SteerMouse wasn't installed so it wouldn't have been the root of the Time Capsule problem on either Mac. In the MBA's case, I resolved that by starting over with a new backup. I don't know if I had ever run Onyx on either Mac previously after macOS 13.1 was installed. But man, what an easy fix this turned out to be! And this gets back to some basic advice many of us, including myself, have given time and time again... after an update, run Onyx's tools to make sure there are no lingering post-install issues caused by a cache that needs flushing. If I had followed my own advice, I would have saved myself a LOT of trouble!
So yesterday I decide to get serious about this, with the expectation that I may have to clean reinstall Ventura. NOT an easy task. I first installed Monterey to an external drive and booted from that repeatedly just to validate that the system was fine and would not claim there was a problem. Success. So I'm not looking at an impending hardware failure. I was back to Ventura to change the default startup disk when I clicked into SteerMouse by mistake (which installs as a System Preference) and got an alert that there was an update. OH HOH! I'm behind by 3 or 4 point updates! So I update that, but the problem with restart errors persisted. I then ran Onyx to purge the caches, rebuild Spotlight, etc etc. And Holy Freaking Cow! Not only did the "restart error" problem go away, but my Time Capsule is now routinely showing me my entire backup history going to 2020, and just to be sure... I successfully recovered a long-deleted app from 2020.
I'm not surprised that Onyx cleared up the restart error problem. I thought I had tried running Onyx once already, but maybe I hadn't. Or maybe SteerMouse being on a version not fully compatible with Ventura was the root of the issue, with a cache cleanup after updating it being needed also. I'm not sure. But fixing the Time Capsule issue? I can only guess that Ventura was struggling to connect for some reason due to some caching issue. I just don't know. I was having the same problem just with the Time Capsule problem on my MBA also and in this case, SteerMouse wasn't installed so it wouldn't have been the root of the Time Capsule problem on either Mac. In the MBA's case, I resolved that by starting over with a new backup. I don't know if I had ever run Onyx on either Mac previously after macOS 13.1 was installed. But man, what an easy fix this turned out to be! And this gets back to some basic advice many of us, including myself, have given time and time again... after an update, run Onyx's tools to make sure there are no lingering post-install issues caused by a cache that needs flushing. If I had followed my own advice, I would have saved myself a LOT of trouble!
