Mac OS X El Capitan GM release deletes historical log files

• September 11, 2015
• technology  
• mac  

I just installed the Mac OS X El Capitan “GM” (golden master) release. I was surprised to find doing so had deleted all the historical log files from my /var/log directory (e.g., /var/log/system.log.0.gz). I had been running the beta builds since they were announced. It is possible, in fact likely, that first beta build behaved the same way and I didn’t notice. Regardless it is pretty obnoxious for an operating system upgrade to delete files that cannot possibly impact the upgrade.

Not surprisingly, given how the /var/log directory was handled, the El Capitan GM release install also deleted every file in the /var/log/apache2 directory. The “upgrade” also replaced my custom /etc/apache2/httpd.conf with a generic config and didn’t even make a backup of the existing config. Jebus H. Christ on a pogo stick!

Thankfully I made a full backup using SuperDuper! before doing the upgrade so I only lost a couple of hours of Apache log data. I’m really disappointed that Apple doesn’t understand that deleting log files during an upgrade is stupid.