Mac Inside & Out · Updates, Time Machine & Recovery · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: The Flower Shop Mac

Help a neighbor's Mac start again after a power cut and find a lost file.

A dark screen at the flower shop

Your neighbor Mrs. Okafor runs a small flower shop. A storm knocked the power out overnight. This morning her Mac mini won't finish starting. It shows the Apple logo, then shuts off again.

She uses a Time Machine drive that sits next to the Mac. Two days ago she also deleted a file called Spring Orders by mistake. She needs both fixed before customers arrive.

You checked About This Mac last month, so you know her Mac has an Apple M2 chip. That means it uses Apple silicon.

Take a breath. Opening the repair tools won't erase anything, so you can start there calmly.

First Aid comes first

The startup options appear. You click Options, then Continue, and sign in with her admin account. The Recovery window shows Restore from Time Machine, Reinstall macOS and Disk Utility.

A sudden power cut can damage the startup disk. You want the gentlest fix that could work before anything bigger. So you open Disk Utility and select her startup disk.

The missing order list

First Aid finds and repairs a problem. You restart, and the Mac starts normally. Mrs. Okafor smiles.

Now for Spring Orders. She deleted it from her Documents folder two days ago, and it's no longer in the Trash. Her Time Machine drive has been plugged in the whole time. She looks worried, but you know just where to look.

Safer next time

Spring Orders is back. Before you leave, Mrs. Okafor asks how to be better prepared.

Her backup drive sits on the shop counter where anyone could pick it up. When it was set up, she never turned on the setting that scrambles the backup with a password. She also wants the Mac to keep itself up to date.