Mac OS X updates - stuff happens sometimes

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 08 July 2008 08:35

Opinion and Analysis

It's tempting to allocate blame in the direction of 10.5.4 or at least the update process, since Entourage was working before the update but not afterwards. And there's always the possibility that Entourage did something strange the last time I quit the application. However, I'm inclined to write the issue off as just one of those things.

I suppose I could have restored the Entourage files from the backup I made immediately prior to the update, but that would probably have taken just as long and there was always the possibility that the corruption had in fact occurred before I installed 10.5.4.

I've seen a few reports of Entourage issues following the 10.5.4 update, but they don't match my problem and they don't appear to be widespread. Examples include an unusable Entourage database, and Entourage failing to sync with Exchange.

The moral of the story? Stuff happens, and one swallow does not a summer make. Though given the negative nature of the subject, maybe that should be paraphrased as 'one snowflake does not a winter make.'

If you run into a problem when you update a piece of software, don't immediately run around accusing the vendor of shipping a POS. In my experience, it's more likely that prior damage to your system caused the problem rather than any inherent fault in the new update. That's why running the combo updater is a widely used troubleshooting method after an incremental Mac OS X update goes astray.

And always back up your most important documents (if not the entire system) before updating an major application or the operating system. You should be making regular backups anyway, but an extra one provides additional reassurance.