Unsanity, whose products I stay away from, seem to have come across some very useful information regarding Apple’s Installer process and a major flaw in it.
You can read about the flaw and check out their software, but personally I’d stay away from anything that requires “APE”. Kudos to them for uncovering this flaw however!
In a nutshell, if “Optimizing System Resources” runs on two or more processors at once, say triggered because you were using your mac while it was updating, some files, randomly may be deleted, zeroed out, kaput, gonesky.
Back when I talked about Apple’s Smug updating reference in Calling Apple to Task several people said I did things a little too cautiously, or they were always lucky.
This nasty multiprocessor bug just verifies the steps I take on each update as sane:
- Run Alsoft's $100 DiskWarrior 4 prior to installation
- Download a "combo" updater if available
- Quit all applications manually, including background applications (Unsanity said to "step away from the computer as if it were a swarm of bees")
- Run the combo updater
- Reboot immediately after installation
I’ll stick with my process as I know it works and I wish you the best of luck in future updates until Apple nails this very nasty bug!
As a bare minimum, obey step 3