124 Macworld • August 2019HELP DESK
failures in time to rescue data. One of the drives
had corrupted files and macOS would freeze when
trying to access those. But the other, seemingly a
little better off, began to unmount itself suddenly.
I had to replace both.- The computer’s peripheral bus is failing
While this seems unlikely, you can read about how I
discovered this problem with a Mac mini a few years
ago, which led to enormous amounts of wasted time
and massive data-recovery efforts.
My best advice? Don’t put off troubleshooting
mysterious unmountings, because either
something’s already wrong or about to get worse.
When iTunes says to ‘restore your iPhone’,
do you have to?
You have a perfectly functioning iPhone and you
plug it via USB to a Mac. When you switch to
iTunes, you see the message: “iTunes cannot read
the contents of the iPhone ‘phone name’. Go to
the Summary tab in iPhone preferences and click
Restore to restore this iPhone to factory settings.”
Depending on how recent your last iTunes or
iCloud backup of your device is, this might be a
little panic inducing. Do you really need to restore
your phone?
It’s unlikely. I and others have routinely
experienced a bug in which this message appears
even when our iPhones (and iPads) are perfectly
fine. The solution is extremely simple: quit iTunes
and relaunch it. If that transient bug is what you’re