explain
In a long shameful convoluted story, I find myself with a new tricked out MacBook Pro 16", and a Time Machine brain transplant from the last machine. Not yet fully cloned. New MBP runs only Catalina. Apple has seen fit to -- get this -- prevent users from writing to the root directory of the filesystem.
Now I need to figure out how I want to map a nearly four-decade-old directory structure to the absurd dictates of my new environ.
jojo69's hell may be different - dunno.
Good
news, everyone.
While it is not really well documented, there is a workaround.
Apple has created a new type of symlink-like filesystem construct. Using this synthetic link, one can create a 'ghost link' in the root of the filesystem. This link can redirect to another place in your filesystem, like any normal symlink. It does not, however, exist on disk. It is instantiated at boot. One configures these links through an fstab-like mechanism: a new file /etc/synthetic.conf.
After creating a link using this mechanism and rebooting, my filesystem looks like it used to. I am now happily restoring over 400,000 files -- over 220GB -- from Time Machine to this new phantom filesystem location. So all my old scripts and such should work just fine.
More info at man synthetic.conf.
Why Apple's second-level support was utterly unaware of this workaround is a mystery. But there you go.
