Today I decided to (finally) upgrade my Mac Mini Server running OS X Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server. The upgrade was way overdue and Mountain Lion appeared to be pretty stable by now, so I decided to make the switch this weekend. Based on other’s good experiences, I had made a last Time Machine backup, disabled incoming mail on my firewall, purchased the update to Mountain Lion in the App Store and started the process.
Unfortunately after about 1 hour of processing i got a message like "Upgrade Failed, system will now restart". After this restart it turned out I was left with a vanilla install of Mac OS X on my Mac Mini Server. It even started to ask all the 1st time questions again including whether I wanted to register my server wit Apple again. Once I logged in it turned out that indeed I had a vanilla installation of the bare OS X Mountain Lion system on my Mac Mini Server, still without the Server components (which was expected). Fortunately all user data was still were it should be (in /Users) but apart from that all system settings and other data (opendirectory, databases, mail, calendars, contacts, etc.) turned out to have moved to a folder called /Recovered Items. Apple… WTF?
A quick scan indicated that no data appears to be lost (pfew…) but I need to do some investigation on how to recover from this and decide whether I want to restore my backups (which eventually won’t resove anything as the next upgrade would probably fail again). The good thing is that although my Mac Mini Server itself is vital for my infrastructure (it runs a few Linux VMs), but it’s own functions are limited to Nameserver, Mail/Calendar/Contact Server and Fileserver for my other Mac. This may be a good moment to start from scratch and document my customizations while recovering…