How long should you expect your Mac’s log to retain entries? Evidence here suggests that anything beyond 5 days isn’t looking good, and expecting to retrieve those made more than 5 days ago is likely to fail.
troubleshooting
When humans explain how to tackle a Mac problem, they usually prefer to use GUI apps when appropriate. AI much prefers you to enter commands into Terminal. This has consequences.
How to use Share Disk in Recovery on an Apple silicon Mac, how fast it can be. Target Disk Mode on Intel Macs, and some less likely alternatives.
What to do when you know there’s an update available, but Software Update pretends that it can’t find it. With details of undocumented options for softwareupdate command and more.
New version adds more detail to the list of log files, and a new graphical view to pick out anomalies in up to 6 weeks of previous log records.
How to browse log entries for an event that occurred many days after its entries have been removed from the active log, by discovering its exact time and the processes involved.
A new app to analyse the size of log entries written by different processes over the last few weeks or months, Logistician. First release version for Sonoma and later.
Get more information about background processes from Activity Monitor, the command tool sfltool performing a BTM dump, attributions.plist, and the log.
You press the Power button, but nothing happens. Has your Mac suddenly died, does it have a problem you can fix easily, or is it just in DFU mode?
You’re sometimes advised to shut your Mac down, wait a while, and start it up again, instead of restarting it. Are they different, and if so when should you use them?
The Eclectic Light Company 