More Thoughts on Yosemite

So, do I take the plunge?

I’ve been using the Yosemite public beta for three days now, and it’s time to check back in. I’m beginning to feel that I need to rethink my initial reluctance to play with Mail in the new OS. Mail is one of the big changes. Should I really wait until the final release to look at Mail?

I need to take some precautions. I’m a sloppy Mail user, typically keeping the last six months of mail in my main mailbox on the Apple mail servers (it doesn’t take up that much space). That can be a bit of a pain when I travel; a couple of time my mail has undergone a lengthy synchronization, as everything gets updated to the time zone I’m in. First step, trim back on the Inbox.

Still, I can keep my mail both on the Mavericks install and in the Yosemite install. I found myself thinking that only a few years ago, I actually kept mail in two places. Most of my mail went on a desktop Mac with a 1Tb drive, while only the most recent stuff was on my laptop. Now the laptop has a 1Tb drive (upgraded it myself) and I no longer have a desktop machine. But, I could certainly treat the Yosemite drive as “another” machine and keep a copy of my mail there.

I’ve been neglectful about backing up. In the time I’ve used Yosemite, I’ve created very few documents, and I could easily copy them over to my main drive. But I need to back that up. A few months ago, my hard drive became corrupted (I went for the Time Machine restore too early; I skipped one thing I should have tried to rescue the situation). About a week after my restore, my backup drive died. Noooooo!

My response was to buy two USB-powered portable drives. I call them Tardis and Spegulo. (For those of you who are not Doctor Who fans, the Tardis is the Doctor’s means of traveling through time and space. For those of you who are not Esperanto speakers, the word spegulo means “mirror.”) Directories can become corrupted. Hard drives do fail. But it’s not going to happen to all three drives.

I’m still leery of doing anything with iPhoto on Yosemite. I am tempted to end the silence and open iTunes, crossing my fingers that the database will still be usable when I cross back over to 10.9.
At some point, I’ll bring the main part of my drive over to Yosemite (but not for Beta 1). It will be after Apple has announced a date for when Yosemite comes out of beta, and when I’m likely to see at most one more beta update before the final release.

Currently, I’ve been using Yosemite without any problems. I’m interested in doing more with it. I’m not going to be reckless though. I'm curious, not crazy.

[Full disclosure: I posted this entry while logged in to Mavericks, so I could start prepping things to take the plunge into Mail.]