Kris, to answer your questions, this Mac that had all the Mail trouble after the Panther upgrade is a dual 2.0 G5 with 8 GB of RAM. The instructions that come with the upgrade don't specifically recommend backing things up beforehand, although I agree that's always a good thing to do. Likewise the demo of Panther on the Apple website just says to pop in the upgrade disk and let 'er go. I already had backed up what I considered the most important things (photos, videos, documents) onto external hard drives, but of course I never thought about mailboxes, and that's what I lost some of.
In Mail, if you delete a mailbox, it doesn't go into the Finder Trash, where you have a chance to retrieve it. When you delete a mailbox, Mail asks you if that's what you really want to do, because it deletes it for good, and it can't be undone. I had so many old empty mailboxes to get rid of that I tried to select and delete them in batches, and one of my batch selections must have included some of the mailboxes that had things in them. That's all I can figure might have happened. At any rate, they sure vanished, and were not in the Finder Trash or anywhere else. And the ISP deletes old messages from their server after a few weeks, so I couldn't recover a lot of older correspondence that way. Gary, you have described the same problems I had with Mail after the 10.5 upgrade: Mail would not send or receive mail, and it could not be quit--it had to be force-quit. The cure, as far as I can tell, was to throw away the com. apple. mail. plist in the Preferences folder, because after trashing that .plist I could quit Mail, but as you probably know, when you throw away that .plist you lose all your settings and have to re-establish your Internet connection all over again. In my case, the help service of my ISP talked me through putting the setting back in on the phone, and then it could send and receive mail again. Now for some good news: Time Machine works. Its first attempt to copy the contents of both internal hard drives failed; after about half an hour it just quit copying. So I thought, here we go again. But the next try, it went all the way and copied everything, quite a feat since there was almost 500 GB of data on those two drives (it said it was copying nearly two million items). It took from midnight to 6 AM to complete the first backup. But now it seems to work, offering to restore data from backups from 3 PM (now) to 6 AM. So, I lost some mailbox contents, but I gained Time machine, Spaces, Quick View, etc., so I guess I came out ahead. Upgrades are always traumatic in one way or another. Tom --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
