Notes Synchronization Mess
It took almost 90 minutes with Apple to get a final answer to the problem of updating Notes and syncing them with your iPhone and iPad. The short answer is, you can't, directly.
Preserving Your Notes from AppleMail
To be specific, if you have been using the Notes feature of Apple Mail.app, they do NOT automatically migrate to the new Notes application when you install Mountain Lion, but they do disappear entirely from Mail.
If you are still using Snow Leopard 10.6 or Lion 10.7, you have to prepare in advance to save your notes before running the Mountain Lion 10.8 upgrade. The process is:
Open TextEdit or your favorite word processor.
Open Mail and go to your Notes. Open the first note.
Select All (Command-A) and Copy.
Switch to your Word and create a new document, if you didn't already.
Paste. Then type a couple of returns at the end.
Go back to Mail and open your next note.
Repeat the process, above.
Repeat all until you have gone through all your Notes and pasted them into that Word document. Save as you go along!
(If you are still using AppleWorks, don't! It does not work in Lion or later.)
Notes on iPhone that Don't Sync
I had a bunch of notes on my phone that did not sync via iCloud, even though any new ones I created did sync. The process of rescuing those is even more convoluted, but it works and it's your only option, as I determined during my session with Apple.
On the phone, open Notes and go to the first one you want to rescue. Hold your finger down on a word until the magnifying glass icon appears under your finger. When you let go, you will have a choice between Delete, Select, and Select All. Choose Select All. Then a new popup will appear: Copy. Tap that.
At the top will be a button called Accounts. Tap that. You should see several categories:
All Notes
From My Mac
Notes
iCloud
All iCloud
Notes
Notes (Mobile Me) You may not have this one.
Tap All iCloud. Click the + at the top right of the screen. A new empty note will appear and the keyboard will pop up.
Press and hold in the typing area and you will get the magnifying icon again. Paste will appear. Tap that. The entire note you Copied should appear.
Tap Done. Then tap Notes. Then tap Accounts. Then tap From My Mac and that will take you back to the rest of your notes.
Go to the second note and repeat the process. Keep doing this, note by note, until you have finished the last one.
This seems like a daunting task, but since it takes the same amount of time for each note regardless of how big each one is, it should take you about a minute each; less when you develop a rhythm.
Yes, I agree, this is one of Apple's bigger screwups. The AppleCare techs also agreed.
Showing posts with label OSX. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OSX. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Mountain Lion Experiences
I ran the upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion today. It went smoothly; took less than half an hour. To prepare, I did a Repair Permissions on the drive with Disk Utility, and then ran Disk Warrior 4.4, the application I use to check and repair directories on all the Macs I service.
Sure enough, mine needed the run; the usual Volume Information Block error was found and fixed. Had I not done that first, the installation might have failed and rendered the drive inoperable. Simply put, you should always run Disk Utility before upgrading, even if only to Verify Disk. There may still be errors present, but it's better than nothing. Disk Warrior costs $99 and is a worthwhile investment for people who want to take care of their own Macs.
Upon restart, I was notified that two of my apps were not going to run in Mountain Lion: Little Snitch and Snapz Pro. Little Snitch has an update available, but Snapz Pro does not. According to the Snapz web site, some of the features work but others were disabled to prevent a kernel panic (that multi-language overlay that appears telling you must restart your computer now). I signed up for emails notifying me when the updated version would be ready.
It's nice that Mountain Lion can perform this check and disable incompatible software before it crashes your Mac.
Safari Back to its Bad Old Tricks
The problem that appeared to be repaired in Safari 6 for Lion has reappeared in Safari 6 for Mountain Lion. Right after the upgrade I went straight to my 25 "Open in Tabs" list of daily comics and there it was - the dreaded "Web pages are not responding" dialog I wrote about in my previous report.
That means that either what was fixed in Lion re-broke in Mountain Lion, or it was never fixed at all and I just didn't experience it during my brief test.
AppleMail - No Drag-Selecting
Previously I could select a range of messages in the INbox (or any other mailbox) by highlighting one message and then clicking in the white area between From and Subject and drag down. Not highlighting first would turn the cursor into an envelope, signifying that the message I had clicked on was being Moved somewhere, i.e. to a different mailbox. Also, dragging directly sideways would invoke the Move cursor.
Now the Move cursor is always invoked. If I want to select a range of items it requires a click on the first item and a Shift-click on the last, selecting the items in between. The usual Command-click on each item selects the item clicked without de-selecting the previously highlighted item. This has always worked that way, and is the same way you highlight items in the List view in a Finder window. I consider this change a loss in functionality.
I still have not found a keyboard command for "Open Next Message." Why something so simple and basic has not been implemented is beyond me.
Return of Save As...
Lion took away the SaveAs option that we have had since the beginning. Their substitution of Duplicate or Rename was confusing and less functional. Good news is that it's back. You must just hold down the Option key when clicking on the File menu to restore the command. To do it via keyboard, you hold down Command, Option and Shift keys while typing an S. That does the same thing.
Notes
At last, a simple app that you can use on your Mac to store any information you want also available on your iPhone or iPad. In the past you had to tie it to the notes in Mail, which were not reliably transferred to your iDevice and required opening Mail to access. This is a feature that existed in OS9 and before, a simple note pad under the Apple menu. Of course there were no iOS devices to sync to, but one could sync to a Palm device back then. Personally, I fixed the problem by keeping text files in Dropbox. That worked fine, but this is a more integrated solution and it is certainly welcome.
Overall
The best news is that I don't notice much difference in the general operation of my Mac at all since the update. It feels the same, runs just as fast, and Safari seems to be the same as it did in version 5.1.7 under Lion. I was really sad to see that it still isn't fixed.
There are a lot of articles and blog posts about Mountain Lion around. I would recommend you visit sites like Macintouch and MacSurfer Headline News and fill in your information with them. No need for me to reinvent their work here.
Sure enough, mine needed the run; the usual Volume Information Block error was found and fixed. Had I not done that first, the installation might have failed and rendered the drive inoperable. Simply put, you should always run Disk Utility before upgrading, even if only to Verify Disk. There may still be errors present, but it's better than nothing. Disk Warrior costs $99 and is a worthwhile investment for people who want to take care of their own Macs.
Upon restart, I was notified that two of my apps were not going to run in Mountain Lion: Little Snitch and Snapz Pro. Little Snitch has an update available, but Snapz Pro does not. According to the Snapz web site, some of the features work but others were disabled to prevent a kernel panic (that multi-language overlay that appears telling you must restart your computer now). I signed up for emails notifying me when the updated version would be ready.
It's nice that Mountain Lion can perform this check and disable incompatible software before it crashes your Mac.
Safari Back to its Bad Old Tricks
The problem that appeared to be repaired in Safari 6 for Lion has reappeared in Safari 6 for Mountain Lion. Right after the upgrade I went straight to my 25 "Open in Tabs" list of daily comics and there it was - the dreaded "Web pages are not responding" dialog I wrote about in my previous report.
That means that either what was fixed in Lion re-broke in Mountain Lion, or it was never fixed at all and I just didn't experience it during my brief test.
AppleMail - No Drag-Selecting
Previously I could select a range of messages in the INbox (or any other mailbox) by highlighting one message and then clicking in the white area between From and Subject and drag down. Not highlighting first would turn the cursor into an envelope, signifying that the message I had clicked on was being Moved somewhere, i.e. to a different mailbox. Also, dragging directly sideways would invoke the Move cursor.
Now the Move cursor is always invoked. If I want to select a range of items it requires a click on the first item and a Shift-click on the last, selecting the items in between. The usual Command-click on each item selects the item clicked without de-selecting the previously highlighted item. This has always worked that way, and is the same way you highlight items in the List view in a Finder window. I consider this change a loss in functionality.
I still have not found a keyboard command for "Open Next Message." Why something so simple and basic has not been implemented is beyond me.
Return of Save As...
Lion took away the SaveAs option that we have had since the beginning. Their substitution of Duplicate or Rename was confusing and less functional. Good news is that it's back. You must just hold down the Option key when clicking on the File menu to restore the command. To do it via keyboard, you hold down Command, Option and Shift keys while typing an S. That does the same thing.
Notes
At last, a simple app that you can use on your Mac to store any information you want also available on your iPhone or iPad. In the past you had to tie it to the notes in Mail, which were not reliably transferred to your iDevice and required opening Mail to access. This is a feature that existed in OS9 and before, a simple note pad under the Apple menu. Of course there were no iOS devices to sync to, but one could sync to a Palm device back then. Personally, I fixed the problem by keeping text files in Dropbox. That worked fine, but this is a more integrated solution and it is certainly welcome.
Overall
The best news is that I don't notice much difference in the general operation of my Mac at all since the update. It feels the same, runs just as fast, and Safari seems to be the same as it did in version 5.1.7 under Lion. I was really sad to see that it still isn't fixed.
There are a lot of articles and blog posts about Mountain Lion around. I would recommend you visit sites like Macintouch and MacSurfer Headline News and fill in your information with them. No need for me to reinvent their work here.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Mountain Lion is Out
They've been threatening it, pundits have reviewed it, I just downloaded it. First I clone my current Lion drive so I can go back if there's a disaster, then I install it on my MacBook Air and give it a runthrough. As always, I advise waiting a little while and check the Mac blogs to see how others are doing. So far, people seem to be happy although a few random incompatibilities are appearing.
I'll run it and let you know this weekend.
Here is a great detailed what-to-do from one of the Apple discussion blogs. This is the kind of thing I should write but have not gone into this much detail. Read and follow this advice when you do your own upgrade. This especially includes waiting a week before you do it!
I'll run it and let you know this weekend.
Here is a great detailed what-to-do from one of the Apple discussion blogs. This is the kind of thing I should write but have not gone into this much detail. Read and follow this advice when you do your own upgrade. This especially includes waiting a week before you do it!
Monday, April 9, 2012
Downgrading Safari in Snow Leopard
How many of you are sick and tired of the bugs and problems that afflicted Safari since the 5.1 update? I sure have. I have wanted to go back to 5.0.5, which was much more stable than the current version. Apple has updated it 5 times now at 5.1.5, and it has only partially helped.
People have told me that you can't downgrade it; Safari is so integrated into the OS that the normal method of tossing the app and installing a previous version simply doesn't work. In Lion, this is true because Lion started with 5.1. Snow Leopard, however, used to load 5.0, and the final version for 10.6.8v1.1 installed 5.0.5.
Well, I succeeded. I have a Mini running Snow Leopard and Safari 5.1.2, and I finally got it to go backwards. This is what I did:
First, you need to make invisible files and folders visible. The simplest way to do this is to download a Dashboard widget that toggles invisibility off or on. Install it and you get a tiny window that says "Hidden Files" with a single button: Show.
To go back later to hiding them, that button becomes a Hide button when invisibles are showing. There is a Terminal command that will do the same thing, but this is simpler, especially for those who are wary of messing about in Terminal.
Next, Trash Safari from the Applications folder. Then go into the Home Library and move the Safari folder to the Desktop. Then open the main Library at the top level of your hard drive. Open Application Support, Apple, then look for the shaded, formerly-invisible files titled .Safari_Leopard, .SafariArchive.tar.gz and .SafariPath. All those files, and all other invisible files (not necessarily folders) begin with a dot. That is why you can't deliberately begin filenames with a dot; that tells the Mac that it is invisible.
Trash those three files. Then restart the Mac.
At first, I thought I could simply install Safari by running the Safari 5.0.5 DMG installer. But when I tried, the installer told me that "This file requires OSX 10.6.7 or later." Well, I had 10.6.8. None of the installers would work. However, I simply reran the OSX 10.6.8 v1.1 Combo Updater, which I had originally used to update from 10.6.7, and lo, there was a shiny new copy of Safari 5.0.5 and it ran perfectly.
Strangely, all my history and bookmarks were in place! They should have still been in that folder on the Desktop but when I looked inside, I found the contents had moved into the one in Library, and the fresh, empty stock bookmark files had wound up in the one on the desktop.
I can't guarantee that would happen to you, so you want to be prepared to do it manually: Move these files into the Safari folder in your Library: Bookmarks.plist, Configurations.plist.signed, Downloads.plist, Form Values, History.plist, and History Index.sk. The folders and other files you can leave behind; they will update themselves as needed. But if the Installer did it for you, skip this step entirely.
To get the final 10.6.8 Combo Updater, get it from Apple. It's okay to run it on top of your existing version of 10.6.8, and if you never ran the v1.1 updater to that, you also get some important bug fixes that afflicted the original 10.6.8 update.
People have told me that you can't downgrade it; Safari is so integrated into the OS that the normal method of tossing the app and installing a previous version simply doesn't work. In Lion, this is true because Lion started with 5.1. Snow Leopard, however, used to load 5.0, and the final version for 10.6.8v1.1 installed 5.0.5.
Well, I succeeded. I have a Mini running Snow Leopard and Safari 5.1.2, and I finally got it to go backwards. This is what I did:
First, you need to make invisible files and folders visible. The simplest way to do this is to download a Dashboard widget that toggles invisibility off or on. Install it and you get a tiny window that says "Hidden Files" with a single button: Show.
To go back later to hiding them, that button becomes a Hide button when invisibles are showing. There is a Terminal command that will do the same thing, but this is simpler, especially for those who are wary of messing about in Terminal.
Next, Trash Safari from the Applications folder. Then go into the Home Library and move the Safari folder to the Desktop. Then open the main Library at the top level of your hard drive. Open Application Support, Apple, then look for the shaded, formerly-invisible files titled .Safari_Leopard, .SafariArchive.tar.gz and .SafariPath. All those files, and all other invisible files (not necessarily folders) begin with a dot. That is why you can't deliberately begin filenames with a dot; that tells the Mac that it is invisible.
Trash those three files. Then restart the Mac.
At first, I thought I could simply install Safari by running the Safari 5.0.5 DMG installer. But when I tried, the installer told me that "This file requires OSX 10.6.7 or later." Well, I had 10.6.8. None of the installers would work. However, I simply reran the OSX 10.6.8 v1.1 Combo Updater, which I had originally used to update from 10.6.7, and lo, there was a shiny new copy of Safari 5.0.5 and it ran perfectly.
Strangely, all my history and bookmarks were in place! They should have still been in that folder on the Desktop but when I looked inside, I found the contents had moved into the one in Library, and the fresh, empty stock bookmark files had wound up in the one on the desktop.
I can't guarantee that would happen to you, so you want to be prepared to do it manually: Move these files into the Safari folder in your Library: Bookmarks.plist, Configurations.plist.signed, Downloads.plist, Form Values, History.plist, and History Index.sk. The folders and other files you can leave behind; they will update themselves as needed. But if the Installer did it for you, skip this step entirely.
To get the final 10.6.8 Combo Updater, get it from Apple. It's okay to run it on top of your existing version of 10.6.8, and if you never ran the v1.1 updater to that, you also get some important bug fixes that afflicted the original 10.6.8 update.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Environment Corruption Causes Strange Finder Menus
Here is an interesting tale of a problem that I ran into last week. The client was running Snow Leopard 10.6.8, and some of the menus in the Finder had replaced the names of the actions (Cut, Copy, Paste, Clear, Print, etc.) with short letter strings that didn't mean anything: H13, H14, A20. There didn't seem to be any pattern or reason for it, and selecting the menu still performed the action.
Initially I had thought I could just reboot from my own Snow Leopard drive and replace their Finder with mine. Same version and all. Surprise: the Finder is not an application. You cannot "find" it to delete it.
When I created a new user account and logged out of the main one and into that, the problem was not there. That meant it was something in the user's Home folder.
First thing I did was toss the Finder preferences file in /Home/Library/Preferences (com.apple.finder.plist). No luck. I figured the system was corrupt so I reinstalled Snow Leopard and ran the updates. The problem remained.
After a few other tries, such as booting in Safe Mode, zapping PRAM and running Disk Warrior produced no results, I gave up and we called AppleCare.
The level-1 tech who took the call made a couple of suggestions but noted that I had already done most of what he would have had me do. He had never heard of this problem. Finally he too gave up and kicked me upstairs to a Level 2 tech. This guy had seen the problem so he had me drop the Go menu, select Go To Folder... and type in /Users/(user home folder)/.MacOSX. I did and it opened an invisible folder in the Home folder.
(New Mac users: The Home folder is the one with the little house icon in the sidebar of any Finder window. Its name is usually a lower-case version of the user's name, and holds Documents, Desktop, Library, Music, Movies, Pictures and a couple of other things. There are also a lot of normally-invisible files and folders in there.)
In that folder was a file called environment.plist. He said, "Take it to the Desktop and then Restart." I did and lo, the problem went away. What happened? "This file can get corrupted for some reason and cause the odd menu display. A new one was created on restart." This is unique to 10.6 and does not happen in Tiger, Leopard or Lion.
So there it is - even after more than 20 years fixing Macs, there can be a surprise around the corner. Now I will know what to do if I ever see this again, but that is probably unlikely, because I had never seen it before. This is what keeps the job interesting.
Initially I had thought I could just reboot from my own Snow Leopard drive and replace their Finder with mine. Same version and all. Surprise: the Finder is not an application. You cannot "find" it to delete it.
When I created a new user account and logged out of the main one and into that, the problem was not there. That meant it was something in the user's Home folder.
First thing I did was toss the Finder preferences file in /Home/Library/Preferences (com.apple.finder.plist). No luck. I figured the system was corrupt so I reinstalled Snow Leopard and ran the updates. The problem remained.
After a few other tries, such as booting in Safe Mode, zapping PRAM and running Disk Warrior produced no results, I gave up and we called AppleCare.
The level-1 tech who took the call made a couple of suggestions but noted that I had already done most of what he would have had me do. He had never heard of this problem. Finally he too gave up and kicked me upstairs to a Level 2 tech. This guy had seen the problem so he had me drop the Go menu, select Go To Folder... and type in /Users/(user home folder)/.MacOSX. I did and it opened an invisible folder in the Home folder.
(New Mac users: The Home folder is the one with the little house icon in the sidebar of any Finder window. Its name is usually a lower-case version of the user's name, and holds Documents, Desktop, Library, Music, Movies, Pictures and a couple of other things. There are also a lot of normally-invisible files and folders in there.)
In that folder was a file called environment.plist. He said, "Take it to the Desktop and then Restart." I did and lo, the problem went away. What happened? "This file can get corrupted for some reason and cause the odd menu display. A new one was created on restart." This is unique to 10.6 and does not happen in Tiger, Leopard or Lion.
So there it is - even after more than 20 years fixing Macs, there can be a surprise around the corner. Now I will know what to do if I ever see this again, but that is probably unlikely, because I had never seen it before. This is what keeps the job interesting.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
10.7.3 Update Results
Lion Update
Well, I did the update to Lion 10.7.3, and I see no change in performance or features. The update included a jump to Safari 5.1.3, which did NOT fix the problem it has been having with pages not responding, and requiring a forced reload of all open pages.
Obviously Apple knew about the problem or they wouldn't have included the dialog box, which did not exist (or at least, was never invoked) in 5.0.5 and before.
Biggest fail, however, is with SuperDuper. It cannot copy a specific invisible folder called /.MobileBackups, which exists at the top level of the hard drive. It fails with a Type 8 due to error 28: No space left on device. This is actually not true; the target drive has three times as much free space as the source drive it is copying.
I sent the report to Shirt Pocket Software, publisher of SD, and maybe they will have a response next week. You who use SD, be sure to click the Send to Shirt Pocket button at the bottom of the report, which you see by choosing the Show Log item in the Window menu, any time your backup fails.
That .MobileBackups folder exists to save older versions of files like TimeMachine does, but it works when the T-M backup drive is not present. I can't blame this on 10.7.3 because it appeared when backing up the 10.7.2 Lion disk before I ran the updater.
I went through half an afternoon trying to clear out that folder, too. First, it's invisible so I have to run the widget "Hidden Files" in order to have the Finder show all invisible files and folder. Then, when I could see it, that folder had a NoEntry icon on it, which told me I could not open the folder because I didn't have enough privileges.
Root User did not help
Okay, I have to get those privileges, so I enable Root User on my Mac and log in as that. This lets me open things not available to a simple Administrator, but lo, the Hidden Files widget cannot be installed and run in Root. So off to Google I go to find the Terminal commands that will enable hidden files. That works. However, when I open the now-readable .MobileBackups folder, I see the items that are causing the problems (as well as wasting 4 gigs of drive space) but it won't let me delete them! Even as root! I am truly playing in a sandbox that Apple does not want anyone to play in.
The failure was caused by some Safari files. After banging around a bit I was finally able to make them go away and lo, the SuperDuper backup works. I return to normal user mode and run the backup so I can load the 10.7.3 update.
When all this was finished, I plugged in a larger hard drive, one big enough that I could partition it to support both Time Machine and SuperDuper backups. Set to run that night, I wake up to a SD failure again, with the same error message pointing to the same /MobileBackups folder, but with a different file in it: the 10.7.3 Combo Update!
This is where I gave up and am waiting to hear from Shirt Pocket.
Addendum
I got a short answer from Shirt Pocket just now: It seems the only workaround is to turn TimeMachine OFF (in System Preferences, Time Machine) for 10 minutes before running SuperDuper. I wrote back and answered if this is something that can be fixed in the next SD update. Will post when I hear back.
Addendum
I got a short answer from Shirt Pocket just now: It seems the only workaround is to turn TimeMachine OFF (in System Preferences, Time Machine) for 10 minutes before running SuperDuper. I wrote back and answered if this is something that can be fixed in the next SD update. Will post when I hear back.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
SuperDuper Super Oops
This is a case of SuperDuper out of control. I was investigating problems with a MacPro that had too much stuff on the hard drive. I launched Grand Perspective, a great app that gives a colored graphical representation of what files are on the drive and how big they are.
I noticed a large section filled with files that started with the path name of the backup drive. Now, normally Grand Perspective only shows the drive you ask it to inspect. I should not have been seeing what I was seeing. Tracing the path, it seemed that it started in the Volumes folder, an invisible folder on all OSX drives.
I made it visible using the widget "Hidden Files" and opened it up. This folder normally contains only aliases to drives plugged into the Mac, including the internal drive(s).
There was no alias for the backup drive. Instead there was a folder with the name of that drive and a second folder named the same but with a 1 at the end.
Switching over to SuperDuper and looking at the Schedule window I found five separate schedules, 15 minutes apart, two of which were in red. The backup was failing every time and I could not select the proper backup drive in its main window.
Somehow two of the schedules had pointed themselves into this Volumes folder and was dutifully backing up the internal drive onto itself in this invisible folder. The real folder had replaced the alias that should have been in Volumes and almost 400 gigs of files had filled it up.
Okay, delete. The first thing I discovered is you can't just delete from the Volumes folder. I would get a -8002 error if I even tried moving it to the Trash. Not knowing the technique to delete things in Terminal, I decided to enable Root and logged in as that. But the folder was invisible again. I tried installing the Hidden Files widget but it would fail to install! This was getting rather frustrating.
Okay, maybe it will work if I restart from my repair drive and log THAT into root and maybe it would let me install the widget there. I normally have Show Hidden Files always enabled when running from that drive so I thought, what the hell, I will try to delete those folders from here.
Surprise. It let me Trash those folders and then option-Empty Trash worked! I deleted both folders, one at a time, after ensuring that there was a successful TimeMachine backup in case my doing this destroyed the rest of the data on his drive. Not only did he have one, but Time Machine does not make copies of those invisible folders so I could have restored without also restoring the problem.
It takes a while to delete 385,000 files, even on a Pro. But when done, I ran Disk Warrior on the Pro's drive, which said it was okay. I restarted and not only did it boot just fine, with the almost 400 gigs of free space restored, but the Volumes folder now had a proper alias of the backup drive right where it belonged.
I created a new SuperDuper schedule and ran the backup and it went perfectly, with no failures.
The lesson for the reader here is that SuperDuper has a glitch that can get you in trouble.
Normally, when you set up the program, you click the Schedule button (after first defining the backup you want as a Smart Backup, not an Erase and Copy) and the window appears, followed immediately by a drop-down window that lets you pick the days and the time for the backup to run. This is how it should work, but the problem is after you create a schedule, the next time you click that button you get the same drop-down. What you must do there is click Cancel, then highlight the schedule script in the window and click Edit to make changes. If you just choose settings in the drop-down, it creates a second (third, fourth and so on) schedule, fifteen minutes later than the last (if you don't specify the time).
These extra schedules caused the problem, two of them having decided to install themselves in the Volumes folder. Then the schedules interfered with each other and the whole thing failed. So be careful when editing your schedule! It is okay to have multiple schedules, especially if you have a second drive with original material on it and you want SuperDuper to clone that drive to another backup drive (or second partition on your main backup drive).
There is a detailed PDF under SuperDuper's Help menu that tells you how to do all this and explains all the features, with pictures and descriptions. But how many users Read That Fine Manual?
Hint: I didn't read it either. I learned through trial and error.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Lion Experiences, part 2
While I like some of the features, I do not like the changes to Spaces. It is now too easy to accidentally invoke a screen shift while difficult to drag items from one to another. I also find it increasingly obvious that this is not really ready for prime time and one should wait for 10.7.1, at the earliest. I am seriously thinking about blowing off Lion and returning to SNL myself. I discovered that now that I can no longer use Eudora, I really hate AppleMail.
Recently I had my first repair call for a Lion installation gone bad. Recovery from this is much worse than I imagined. First the warning:
DO NOT DO THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE MADE A CLONE BACKUP OF YOUR SNOW LEOPARD DRIVE!
Even a TimeMachine backup is not sufficient because full recovery from them is very difficult. You want to be able to boot off of your backup drive and clone it all back, killing Lion completely.
This client had broken all the rules. He left his startup items in place (System Preferences, Accounts, Login Items) instead of deleting them all. Each restart automatically launched incompatible apps, causing crashes. He did not do a Repair Disk and Repair Permissions with Disk Utility first.
He did this on his production Mac Pro, without a clone backup. All of this made his Mac's Murphy chip glow hot with excitement. If he had the clone, the chip might have let his installation succeed, but due to the other factors he would still have had problems. Without a clone it is impossible to return to Snow Leopard without erasing the drive before installation, and since TimeMachine had already run, all he could have recovered were his documents.
Lion installs an emergency recovery partition on your drive that contains a copy of Disk Utility and a minimal system. You access this by holding down the Option key at startup and choosing it from the icons that immediately appear. At the moment that is the ONLY repair program available; DiskWarrior will need an upgrade to work on a Lion system.
Oh, the icing on the turd: his drive was 98% full. You should never let a startup drive go beyond 80% because the rest of the space is needed by virtual memory for swapfiles, printing for temporary spool files, caches and the like. I was able to get him down to 92% full, which helped, and set him about clearing off the rest of the space hogs to an external drive. Then I had him go buy another drive for SuperDuper and get that running. I believe, but am not certain, that SuperDuper's latest version is compatible. (2.6.2 is not.)
Disaster story
Speaking of that Murphy chip, another client has suffered hard drive failure on a production iMac with NO backups. This is not repairable due to actual disk damage. I am able to rescue files with DiskWarrior, but that particular iMac does not use industry-standard drives (special heat sensor built onto the drive) so I could NOT keep the old one for later recovery (which I had started to do using DiskWarrior). To fix under warranty Apple wants the dead drive back immediately as an exchange or they want $340 cash for the new one. They give only 48 hours slack for the old drive to be returned. Mac shops do not keep extras of this drive in stock. Oh, and she had deadlines to meet. Those deadlines are now dead.
Most of you already know this and are doing it now, but for those of you who are not, here are some questions to ask yourself:
Would you feel badly if your Mac woke up dead and you lost every document on it, including your email, web bookmarks, Documents folder, iTunes music, etc.? Some people only use their Macs for Web browsing and email and keep the email on the server (Gmail, for instance) so they could lose their data without worry.
Do you use your Mac for production? Could you do without it for a week? With a clone backup you can boot from the clone and finish critical work before taking your Mac in for repair, or move it to a 2nd Mac, if you have one. That 2nd Mac would need to be able to boot from the same drive, impossible if your main Mac is Intel and the other one is PPC. You might have problems launching applications from the clone on the 2nd Mac if the registration is tied to the machine (Adobe is the killer here).
Do you have a lot of documents you do not want to lose, but can do without your Mac while it's being repaired? A TimeMachine backup is sufficient for you. A daily clone is much more convenient because a TimeMachine backup will still require you to reinstall your applications. If you have CS5 purchased as an upgrade from an earlier CS version, you will need the older disk, or at least the serial number, to install the upgrade. Can you find it?
The answer for all Mac user except the extremely casual user cited above is this: Go buy an external drive now. If you want to combine TM and Clone on the same drive, it should be a terabyte, partitioned into two volumes. Check your internal drive now - how much data is on it? Highlight it with a click and type Command-I. It will tell you the capacity of the disk, how much data is on it now, and space remaining. If you have a 500Gb or 1Tb internal drive but less than 100Gb full, a 500 will do you. The clone volume can be 200Gb with the other one serving TimeMachine, which does not delete older versions of documents and needs more space. Powered drives are usually 1Tb and are cheaper than unpowered portable 500 drives, but if you have a laptop and want to take your backup with you, the portable is better. Be aware that both could be stolen! Better to leave the backup drive at home or have ANOTHER cloned backup stored elsewhere. Hardcore paranoids rotate backup clones each week, keeping one in a safety deposit box.
It's your data. DriveSavers charges $1500 and up to recover a dead drive. How lucky do you feel?
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