Taming the Lion

My recommendation: Do not upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion prior to the release of a significant technical update.

Here is why:

• FileVault:

  The first thing Lion did to me was killing 3 of my accounts (data loss!), including the admin account for the machine. This happened during my attempt to turn on FileVault. On the first attempt I managed to turn FileVault on. But due to the loss of the admin account I had to do a clean install, requiring me to erase the whole disk and restoring all data from backup.

  After the clean install I was not able to turn FileVault on again. Every time I tried, the system would reboot twice and FileVault would remain turned off. The reason is somewhat unclear, but it seems that on startup the encrypted drive produces errors and will therefore be reverted to plain HFS+.

• Spotlight:

  Lion lost the Spotlight index and therefore tried to reindex the drive all the time so I could not search and it slowed down my machine.

  I reset the Spotlight index and now Spotlight works fine. (To reset the index I put the disk in the “privacy” [i.e. do not index] section in the Spotlight system preference panel for a short time.

• Time Machine

  I tried to use an encrypted backup. Unfortunately the backup disk failed to mount after a restart. I found that suspicious and checked the disk. Disk utility found severe, irreparable errors. I had to reformat the drive, this time with no encryption.

  However even on an unencrypted drive Time Machine seemed to be unusable because it was slower than the slowest snail. For example Time Machine told me that the remaining time for a full backup would be about 40 000 days.

  I decided to ignore these estimates and the full backup actually took much less time. Now Time Machine does its job normally.

  I suspect that if you interrupt the first backup Time Machine has to check all files backed up so far for changes. During this check almost no data is copied but Time Machine will calculate the remaining time based on data throughput during this check.

Well, now it seems everything is working fine except from FileVault 2 and encrypted backups. But it was a bit of a hassle. So my recommendation: wait for 10.7.1.

Addendum:
Thinking about it, all my troubles with Lion seem to be related to CoreStorage and encryption.

I have now running all my Macs under Lion. Everything works fine. Spotlight show its reindexing message occasionally, but all drives are actually searchable during the process. (Maybe it is a feature not a bug.) The Time Machine issue seems to have been just a miscalculation of the remaining time of the initial backup.

So I feel I have to restate my recommendation: Unless you want to use FileVault and encrypted backups it seems quite safe to upgrade. (Well, of course, if you use applications not compatible with Lion such as apps compiled for the PPC-architecture then you might not want to.) If you count on FileVault full disk encryption my recommendation is to wait with the upgrade or stick to legacy FileVault (FileVault 1 – user folder encryption). You can continue to use FileVault 1 under Lion, you have to activate it under Snow Leopard, though. So you can’t use it on a clean install system.

John Siracusa’s Lion Review

Like always John Siracusa has written an excellent review of the latest iteration of Mac OS X:

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

P.S.: Well, obviously I was a little hasty with my update, but of course I did do a backup before. ;)

The Sick Lion

I just tried to install Mac OS X Lion (10.7) on my Macbook. It was probably the worst installation I have ever experienced. Lion crashed and killed my admin user so I could only log in as a normal user with no rights. There is basically no way of a clean install unless you format the entire disk. The @«€&-?! installer has to be downloaded every @«€&-?! time which takes forever. It was more fun to install System 7 off floppy disks.

Update:
After having wiped my disk, I am no longer able to activate FileVault because the recovery partition has also been wiped and not been reinstalled by the Mac OS X Lion Installer. The whole process is so unbelievably stupid. Does anyone at Apple even have tested this? I am currently downloading the installer for the 4th time... Un-@«€&-?!-believable...

Update 2:
OK, it was not the recovery partition. It is there. But FileVault just does not work. I reinstalled the system. I reset the PRAM. I checked file system integrity. I checked and repaired (there were errors!) file permissions. All to no avail.

I must say this is one of the worst experiences I have ever, ever had with any Apple product.

These problems are probably related to FileVault. Apart from FileVault the clean install system seems to work just fine. But… I’ll stick with Snow Leopard until I get FileVault to work. And, frankly, I would like my money back. That’s why you should not run a .0-release if you want things to just work. Apple’s software is no exception here. I should have known better.