You’re looking for an email invitation you sent months ago, but the option to search through each “Entire Message” in Mail is grayed out entirely. Instead, you search iCal for the appointment itself, only to find the results are empty. Thinking you have the minutes stored somewhere on your hard drive, you try searching in the Finder but discover that even items displayed in open windows can’t be located. Spotlight indexing has broken on your local machine.

Just two weeks after EMC began shipping Retrospect 8.0, the newest version of their long-neglected and much-maligned backup software for Macintosh, a catastrophic bug was found which can accidentally erase any data stored within a multi-tape library.

If you support an art department as part of your job, chances are the Adobe Creative Suite is all they really care about. The OS could go without updates, Office could go without security patches, and you could go on vacation without them noticing as long as Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat all worked properly. Which is why it’s so upsetting when a CS4 installation that’s worked for months suddenly gives this error instead:

There is no single dialogue box that strikes fear into systems administrators like a user being prompted to update their own software. Whether it’s the Mac OS itself, Adobe’s Creative Suite, or Microsoft’s Office products, updates have a history of breaking almost as many things as they solve.

If you support a design department of any size, various font problems have long been a thorn in your side. If your organization hasn’t felt your pain and moved to an expensive server-based solution, that means there’s a good chance you’ve been running some version of Extensis’ Suitcase as your font management tool. Like it’s competitors Font Agent Pro and FontExplorer, Suitcase has had a checkered technical past, but the new Suitcase Fusion 2 seemed to be a well designed and stable product. Then Apple shipped Leopard 10.5.6.

Most Windows users have learned the hard way not to update more than they have to. After all, you never know what the newest fix might break. But when Microsoft issued the Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update, including “fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of a computer’s memory”, that sure sounded to Mac users like an update they shouldn’t wait on.

If your job is to administer Macintosh computers, odds are that much of your time is spent working with Adobe’s Creative Suite. And while many have been tempted to uninstall Adobe products out of frustration, removing Creative Suite entirely can be an important (and difficult) step to effective troubleshooting or a clean upgrade.

Despite Apple’s encouragement to install OS upgrades as soon as they’re released, most systems administrators test updates for a couple of weeks to see if any obvious or significant issues occur in their environment. It’s been two weeks since Apple released Leopard 10.5.3, and while the update fixes a laundry list of problems (including Active Directory, AFP, iCal, Time Machine, and SMB issues), it breaks one simple feature that most Mac users simply can’t live without: With 10.5.3 on client or server machine, some Adobe CS3 applications (primarily Photoshop, but occasionally InDesign) can no longer save to network shares.

Although Mac OS X has excellent built-in PDF support, there are some jobs that only Adobe’s Acrobat can do. The ability to combine existing documents, create editable forms, and encrypt sensitive data all make Acrobat an indispensable tool. It’s too bad, then, that the application has such a checkered history when it comes to stability. Acrobat 8 Professional, for instance, often crashes right out of the box. If it’s doing so in your environment, there are several ways to get things running smoothly again.

With the ability to store and encrypt any password on Macintosh systems, the Keychain can be a mixed blessing. It’s easy for users to save time and effort with a single sign-on system for email, website, and file sharing access. It’s equally easy to lose track of passwords that, thanks to a secure and convenient alternative, people seldom type themselves. Most users know the pain of an important but forgotten password. Next time it happens, there’s a painless way to save their day.