Inside my Mac Pro

I’ve owned this 2019 Mac Pro for about 2 years, so it’s well overdue a nuke and pave. It’s the base model except that it has 2TB of flash storage rather than the base 256GB. Aftermarket add-ins are a PCI card with slots for four 2·5” SATA devices and a SATA card with extra USB3 and USB-C ports. 

The SATA devices on the card share the card’s PCI bandwidth, but there are normally just two of them, used only for nightly CarbonCopyCloner backups, so they do not noticeably interfere with anything. CCC backups take under 7 minutes, compared with 10-15 on my old Mac Pro. 

The Mac been running macOS Catalina (10·15) ever since I got it. It’s been wonderful, but over the last few months, it’s kept losing links to folders from all Finder window sidebars. When this happens, all he desktop icons also disappear. Restarting restores the desktop icons, but I have to add all the sidebar links from scratch. Bah!

This weekend I will not be doing any academic or community work, so it’s time to flatten the flash storage and install macOS Monterey (12.4)!

However, my wife always keeps her iMac and MacBook Air on the latest version of macOS (installing over the top rather than nuking each time). She tells me that the incarnation of OneDrive for Monterey does not have an option for always, automatically keeping local copies. If true, that’s a show-stopper for me. So, I want to do a trial installation before risking losing the current install. Here’s the plan:

0. Back up everything multiple times - done:
   a: the two nightly CCC backups to the SSDs
   b: TimeMachine backup to an external TimeCapsule
   c: nightly CCC backup of my MacBook Air (which is synced with the Mac Pro via ResilioSync) to 1TB of external spinning rust
   d: TimeMachine backup of the MBA to a separate external TimeCapsule.

1. Install a spare 1TB SSD in one of the vacant slots on the PCI card - done.
2. Erase it as a MacOS Extended device with two 500GB partitions - done.
3. Use CreateInstallMedia to make one of those partitions a Monterey installer volume - done.
4. Tomorrow, use that installer to install Monterey on the other partition/volume.
5. Restart from in Monterey, and test whether OneDrive plays nice.
    If it does, nuke and pave the flash storage with Monterey.
    If it doesn’t, nuke and pave the flash storage with Catalina. 
7. Reinstall just the apps I know I want, and restore my data from backup.

The extra is my icon for spinning rust. Snurk!