Comments for The Occasional Blog

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by Ria

Ria — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:55:34 +0000

Mike,

Thanks for the speedy response. I actually read that one prior to finding your blog.

I really appreciate the suggestion though. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the new iOS 10.5.2 and the now defunct app resulting from the upgrade.

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by Mike

Mike — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:47:48 +0000

Ria-
I hadn’t run across that particular problem before. I found this thread on Apple’s discussion forums that may help, however.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2179262?start=0&tstart=0

Good luck!

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by Ria

Ria — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:06:25 +0000

Ok, read through your very helpful blog (much gratitude for the time invested). Unfortunately, it hasn’t answered the issue I am experiencing.

Very long story short, trying to reload a previous version of iTunes application back on to my laptop from Time Machine. I am able to open, view & select iTunes. Everything seems to work just fine & the Restore process seems to be working . . . . then I get an error message telling me I don’t have permission.

Comment on Weight loss goal achieved by christina thomas

christina thomas — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:08:50 +0000

Very nice and good job. A few simple things that you can try for weight loss easily, are drinking plenty of water throughout the day to regulate your metabolism and avoiding calorie-rich snacks.

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by Mike

Mike — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:34:18 +0000

John-
As long as you’re starting from scratch with the portioning and Time Machine setup, you should have no problems. One will be dedicated to TM and the other for files. FYI, you actually can do both on one partition but the problem is that TM will use all available space so you’ll eventually have a problem if you want to add more files but TM is consuming all available space.

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by John

John — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:03:50 +0000

I have a Time Machine question.

I am setting up a two disk mirrored Raid for time machine and I would also like to use the same HDD to stash my photos and itunes library. Is this a safe thing to do? I was going to split the disk into two 500 gig partitions and use one for music and photos and the other for Time machine.
Will this cause an issue should I have to use the disk utility to “fix” stuff? I think that I read that rebuilding permissions can cause issues with Time Machine files.

Thanks

John

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by Mike

Mike — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:08:32 +0000

David-
Yeah, that should be considered NOT normal behavior. ;-) First, I would suggest disabling TimeMachine while you work to resolve things. Second, try running Disk Utility and perform a repair to see if there is something notably wrong. A final option, if you’re willing, is to wipe the external drive and start over. If you’re not inclined to go that route, you can hit Apple’s support forums to see if there has been others with similar problems. Good luck!

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by David Booth

David Booth — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 08:14:22 +0000

I’m using Time Machine on my 250gb MacBook, using a 320gb WD external drive. All seams to be ok except that the MacBook freezes when a backup is taking place. This is pretty bad as it stops me working for 10 minutes every hour. I thought that you were supposed to be able to carry on working whilst Time Machine was running? Any ideas……………….

Comment on I learned all about Time (Machine) so you don’t have to by muc

muc — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 21:31:21 +0000

Hi there,

I also learned alot about TimeMachine while spending hours to find a workaround for the problem with automatic backups.

My Setup:
External USB harddrive (simple and effective :), one Partition with HFS, journaled, case-sensitive
on this disk a crypted sparsebundle with the hosts MAC address as name (i don’t like the idea of “loosing” the external disk somehow and exploiting all my personal stuff :)

a while ago it stopped making backups automatically, but it worked perfectly when starting a backup manually (mounting the sparsebundle automatically). This became very annoying, because the best feature of a backup tool is doing it silently and regularly – automatically.

I fiddled around really alot with all tools I found on my mac and came up with a workaround that triggers a backup automatically, but one still has to click once – but at least it asks regularly automatically :)

Thats the deal:
The time machine would ask “use this backup” and then mount and use the sparsebundle automatically, when the DestinationUUID in the TimeMachine.plist was set to the HFS Partition/Disk of my external drive. After accepting this question, the DestinationUUID gets set to the UUID of the mounted sparsebundle – and with that, automatic backup could not find the backup disk anymore – whether mounted or not.

So I created a cron that resets the DestinationUUID to the UUID of the external Disk regularly (the command “defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DestinationUUID” prints the currently set DestinationUUID of TimeMachine).
And it works great! TimeMachine asks me about every hour and I just click “use this disk” and it starts backing up…

here’s my cron: copy this into a file and start it every 50 minutes (using “crontab” or CronniX App for example)
——–
#!/bin/bash
# reset DestinationUUID to external disk, this enables automatic backup again, but with questioning
# uuid of external disk (set this to the value set by selecting the external disk in TimeMachine)
backup_uuid=”63008BAB-DA4E-38DE-84F5-DF9561E8A31B”
# query current uuid
uuid=$(defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DestinationUUID)
if [ -z "$(ps ax |grep [/]backupd)” -a $uuid != $backup_uuid ]; then
echo “setting UUID = $backup_uuid”
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DestinationUUID $backup_uuid
fi
——–

I hope this is of help for anyone out there :)
Muc

PS: I heard that OsX Lion supports encrypted backups on external disks by default. I’ll try that soon I think :)

Comment on A geek confession by Jessica DeLine

Jessica DeLine — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:05:31 +0000

Yes! Start with the new series as Gabe and Devin said. Then you can go back and watch some of the streaming stuff on Netflix. They’ve done a really good job with the new series. The old stuff is great to watch – it’s definitely a bit more campy at times and the special effects are cheesy but they didn’t have much of a budget :) When you go back to the old shows start with anything that has the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and avoid the 6th doctor until you have to watch him :)