The rebuild begins

Nervously tonight I bit the bullet and told macOS to erase all content and settings, take me back to factory settings. A minor hiccup came in the form of Find My not having updated to the alternate email address, so I had to first sign it of iCloud before macOS would start the process.

I had expected it to be a more painful process requiring me to download a copy of macOS from the internet, not so, instead it very quickly disassociated with the previous login account and a few minutes later the “Hello” screen displayed for me to get underway setting up as new.

It’s only when you start the process of connecting once more to your iCloud account with many, many gigabytes of data, that you wish you were so fortunate to have a gigabit connection to the internet as opposed that 50 megabit you pay for each month. As I sit here, after several hours, my data is almost finally downloaded such I might begin the process of downloading applications and making my Mac usable one more.

So how’d it go?

Well, it’s the following morning, and I’m still going, though am mostly finished installing everything, and in the wrap-up phase. I chewed up almost 70GB of downloads last night reinstalling apps and resyncing iCloud data back to my MacBook Pro. This morning I’ve focused upon getting Windows 11 running within Parallels for Mac Pro and adding Office 365, thankfully I have an EDU license key which saved me several hundred dollars there – is only used for university work purposes, so fair call. Getting Windows 11 to actually do an update has proven painful as hell though, attempt 501 currently underway, and it has FINALLY agreed to progress it – I’ll buy a lotto ticket as they say haha.

Thankfully, before I began this whole process I made a rather large list of all the apps I needed to reinstall, such a time saver as I have used to check off one-by-one.

The post reinstall MacBook Pro is feeling better, though I haven’t put NordVPN or McAfee Total Protection back on as yet. I’m going to do a TimeMachine backup first to ensure I can revert should I experience an issue with either, though I am sorely tem