Issues after installing update to Mojave 10.14.6 (18G6032)

I tried ”Restore from Time Machine Backup” and saw a considerable improvement on speed. However, no Apple or 3rd party apps were restored and I was left with “?” across my dock, and nothing in the “Applications” or “Utilities” folders. I couldn’t open “About this Mac” or “System Preferences.”

Returned to my Apple support ticket started yesterday, and they suggested “Reinstall MacOS”. It took me back to Mojave 10.14.6 from September 2019 (2019-005). However immediately it wanted to install 2020-05 Security Update and Safari update. I did not allow the Security update based on reviewing comments from this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/security-update-2020-005.2256677/ But I manually downloaded 2020-03 and updated. https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2045

The “Applications” and “Utilities” folders and Apple apps were restored. Apple support suggested that running Migration Assistant might restore 3rd party apps but only if reinstalled MacOS version, including security update version, is a match or newer than the Time Machine backup. Attempted to run Migration Assistant, but it failed both times I tried.

Situation now is that the response time for most actions is still slow but not as bad as with 2020-05. I have to reinstall 3rd party apps because TM restore does not include support for automatically restoring them. Two days lost.

Praying Apple engineers can get on this a.s.a.p.

Hi Moonlight Mac,

The computer still fails to behave. My macOS 10.14.6 reports to be on build 18G5033. I keep refusing the 2020-005 update.

My fans and CPU usage go nuts for hours after restarting. They have finally calmed down today after about 3 hours.

I had to reinstall, Pages, Numbers and 3rd party apps, after the OS and TM reinstall. This included Chrome. On attempting to open Chrome after re-installation, I was presented with the merciless rainbow wheel followed by a status bar with the 'security' house image and a "Verifying "Chrome..." message. And so it also goes for every document I open, I get the "Verifying "file name" message, even when it is opening in native apps like Preview and Numbers. Sometimes the wait for the "Verify" to complete is 60 plus seconds.

Not only that, when attempting to open a Numbers or Pages document directly through Finder, the preview window spinner spins for a while, then the merciless rainbow wheel spins and then after 90 seconds I'm told the file does not exist. I thought I had circumvented this error when it first occurred after reinstalling Numbers and Pages a couple of days ago. But the bug has reappeared. My fix was to create a new 'test' Numbers (or Pages) document and save it to the root directory where the 'non-existant' file was located. After that I could open the 'non-existent' file.

This time, after receiving the 'non-existent' file error, I tried opening Numbers and then Opening the document from within Numbers, which worked. So I closed the document and tested reopening the document from Finder (with Numbers open in the background). What appeared? The "Verifying "document.numbers"" status window before the file would open. And yes, this was the same document that had been open seconds before.

There must be some very serious security issues that have been detected within a wide range of file types and sources for this heavy handed crackdown on verifying every document and app that is opened.

6 hours after ‘security update’ including two hours with Apple Support and still no resolution to my system issue. I will revisit this in the morning 😞

Thank you. I will try same and report on progress.