Stopping For Awhile

I've gone and messed up the computer again, AND discovered I never did have it fixed right like I thought recently.  I thought the only problem left was duplicate photos.  And maybe I should have just lived with those.

But I hate unresolved problems, so I can't working at apps that promised to find duplicate photos and remove them.  They didn't work.  So last night I sat down and started deleting them manually.  It's tedious but doable.

I set up detailed folders routinely.  Used to drive the IT at work nuts.  Well, I like to make things suit myself, and what I could do, I did.

That has now come to haunt me.  My folder organization works fine for me, but apps (Windows nor Mac) are not designed to deal with such complications.  The old "iPhotos" Mac app undertood the difference between the original large photos and the highly-processed smaller photos I saved elsewhere.  The new "Photos" Mac app does not.  It sees ALL photos everywhere.

I did not know that.  So i managed to delete a whole lot of my processed photos while manually trying to delete "duplicates".  And that's not the only thing.  Nothing has really been working right since I "upgraded" to the latest Mac operating system (Catalina).

It can't be removed.  Which is why I bought a new Mac, but tipped a glass of wine onto the old one (killing the hard drive), and have been struggling since.  Some of that is not Apple's fault (they didn't tip the wine glass).  But that wouldn't have happened if Catalina was revertable to the previous operating system like all the previous ones were.  If it was revertable, I could have just reverted and gone happily on.

So here is the situation.  I'm going back to an October backup from an external hard drive of the later-drowned Mac HD.  I will try migrating back to this computer.  I will then try to use the backup I will make to a different external HD with some current files (like my email and new photos).

And I am going to be gone until then.  Days, weeks, I don't know.  What I do know is that I can't blog, visit, try to fix the computer (getting everything back), get my garden going, repair balky yard equipment (having a problem with those too), and take care of home and cats all at the same time.  And if I try to spend most of my day getting the computer back to pre-Catalina, I will go utterly nuts.

So, this is a (hopefully) brief sign-off and I will return with a gloriously working computer and a lot of new cat-pictures.  If I fail, I will starting from scratch, and I will go from there.

But I don't know when...