But I try to never miss my backups.

By the way, my little friend is taking the week off. We all need some time off.

I say try because I, like everyone else, occasionally miss a backup. That’s really okay because everyone is not perfect and guess what? Neither am I ! Hope I did not burst the bubble you may have held for me.

Alright it’s time to be humble again. This past 2 weeks have been very, very, hectic for me. Between doing work on a presentation for Chadsey high school all class Christmas party. This is a group of multiple years of graduation classes since the school has been in existence. I am doing a presentation using year books dating back to 1940. I requires a great amount of scanning and formatting of a lot of materials. Needless to say many nights of work.

Whenever I am doing that type of detailed and labor intensive work, I always do a backup periodically. I mean I do a backup every so often to make sure that if I have a problem and have a hardware problem with my Mac , I can recover on another Mac if there is a problem. Also if a suffer a disaster (water,fire, or theft), I have another chance to recover. Nothing is worse that working on a project and losing the work and have no way to recover, and also have a timeline to meet and not enough time to do the rework. If you have been there, you know what type of hell that is.

So periodically I backed up both to an external bootable as well to tape and then I stored one of the two backups offsite. I never had to sweat.

I was also officiating my first National Figure Skating assignment so I was also working on this project at the end of the skating day in my hotel room. I used Dropbox for my offsite backup from my hotel room in case of problem and it was there for me when I got back home.

By the way I had a tremendous time at the USFS Jr. National Championships in Lansing Michigan. I am part of the accounting team, the people “that are the first to come and the last to go”. I seem to relish the “roadie” lifestyle jobs. I worked with a fabulous team of accountants and tech accountants and had a great time!

Here is the crew. The women are from left to right. Barbara – Accountant, Sue – Chief Accountant, Ellen – Tech Accountant, JoAnn – Accountant, Cathy Tech Accountant, and the guy in the back, me, Tech Accountant as well. I can’t think of a better team I have ever worked a National with!

+-

See ya next Friday!

Friday day was amazingly CRAZY.

I would like to have one of those that you’re having young lady

By the way she always drinks Canada Dry Ginger ale with a wedge of Lime. Mmmmmmm!

Last week I had to rebuild an older Mac G4 Tower. It’s my “backup unit’ literally. In two senses. One, I use it in case I have a problem with one of my other primary Macs. Two, my tape backup units are connected directly to this G4 Tower. Yes, I still and will continue to use tape to backup my video projects. Tapes have an excellent retention time and for me, I have found this to be an economical choice for me at this time. The tapes also don’t take up a lot of space for me and easy to organize in a file drawer I have especially for tapes. The tapes also use less space at my offsite location.

How did I handle the rebuild?

Sure, I could have just used the Mac OS X upgrade process and did an in place upgrade. Most times in the past it has worked just fine but I have found a “Clean” install seems to work much better. I love a fresh system. Process for doing the upgrade.

1) Perform a Super Duper clone backup of the existing computer.

2) Test the Clone backup to make sure that it will boot and run successfully

3) Using Disk Utility, Erase and Format the internal hard drive.

4) Install the new version of Mac OS X. Apply all of the updates to the O/S.

5) Install the needed applications and utilities.

6) Merge back the data and setting from the clone backup using a simple Finder copy.

7) Test all of my needed applications and communications.

Retain the Super Duper clone copy for 30 days or mare to make sure that the upgrade is checked out completely.

This process has been the best for me and I have always been successful getting my upgrades in place.

By the way if you are just crazy to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion, this is a good process to follow along with some other notes which i will pass on to you in future weeks.

Musical Selection

This weeks music is strictly for entertainment purpose.  normally try to find something to match the theme of the week but this week, throwing that out just for the beat. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pA_Tou-DPI

Radio Days —

Even though the “Internet Advisor” show is pre-empted for the MSU football games doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy it. Foster, Gary, Ed, and I still do the show but it’s recorded for broadcast later on other network stations. You can still enjoy it two ways.

1) Go to the website http://internetadvisor.net and get the podcast of the show.

2) Go to the website http://internetadvisor.net and submit a question to the forums. Leave you name and phone number as well and we can call you back during a taping and answer your question. See details on the website.

C YA!

An interesting question came up on the MacGroup iBBS today (and if you're a MacGroup member, you really owe it to yourself to sign up for the iBBS). Someone using Time machine to back up their Mac was wondering where all the space went on his disk drive. He has a 500 GB disk that under half used, yet his 1 TB Time Machine drive is at 924 GB used. Fortunately, he also mentioned a key piece of information – he runs Windows as a virtual machine using VMWare's Fusion product. 

Virtual machines are a great way to run Windows, Linux, and now another copy of Mac OS X as a secondary machine while you're running your current machine – no need to reboot or re-partition you hard drive. You do lose some speed this way, but if you're running Office or some other non-realtime, intensive programming, this can be a great way to run a program that's written for some other OS on your Mac.

Instead of installing to a physical hard drive, virtual machines (VMs) install to virtual disks – which are basically large file, sort of like a .DMG or an .ISO file is a mountable disk image. When you look on disk, you see a single file that represents your VM, but in reality that's a container. You can right-click on a VM and if you Show Package Contents you'll see something like this: 

I've highlighted the virtual disk – the file is pretty large, as you can see. 

So what's all this got to do with the full-up Time Machine disk?  Well, when you start up your virtual machine, you open this file. Windows, or what the guest OS is, will start writing log files and other system files even if you don't do anything else. So this file gets updated. Every hour, Time Machine looks at files that have been updated and copies them out to its backup, keeping as many older versions as it can on hand until it's forced to start removing files to make room.

So if you were to leave Windows up for a day, with a 20 GB file, and let Time Machine back it up every hours, you'd be looking at around 500 GB used up for just this file. Older copies of other files might get removed to make room.

That's why you need to exclude these files from your Time Machine backups – they're just too large. You can do this by opening up Time Machine's preferences and then clicking on "Options…" to bring up a list of disks, directories, and files that you want excluded. Parallels I believe excludes their VM directory automatically during install.

You may have other files like this Microsoft Entourage has a single database file where it stores all emails. Get one email an hour, and you get a new copy of this file. If you have a lot of email, suddenly you have a lot of disk eaten up on your Time Machine backups. So you should exclude that file as well.

So if you exclude these files, what happens if you need them back? Well, hopefully, you aren't relying solely on Time Machine for your backups. If you read calvin's articles on Fridays, he explains about the different backup types, and when to use what. Suffice to say here that you should be taking regular clone backups of disk in addition to Time Machine backups. You can only restore files from a Time Machine backup, you can't boot. But you can boot a clone and be up rather quickly (if maybe a bit behind in some files – that you can restore from your Time Machine backup).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LVC9eW9Q4E

Friday,

How Tasty

French Fries, Fried Fish, Fried Ice Cream.

Well enough about about food and let's get to the meat of the matter. I guess I did not get off the food, but I digress.

See You in September

It's that time of year again. Many young people and some older ones are going back to school. I am pretty much focusing on college students with this writing so it can be both old and young. One of the needed items when going back to school is the laptop computer.  These are items that are not low cost if you are getting a decent one or a Mac.  Young folks with their active lifestyle can be really rough on electronics at school. This is even more the reason to make sure that your homeowner's insurance policy not only covers for the laptop, but for "all perils" as well.

The perils of Pauline's laptop

Lets talk about perils. There are two type. The first is the perils that are physical and directly to the Mac or other laptop computer. This would be accidents like water damage, heat,  and of course theft. Laptops have the issue of "growing legs" and walking away if you are not watching it constantly in public. Theft is an easy way to lose a laptop. Make sure to consult with your insurance agent on coverage. Sometimes a "rider' of $25.00 more a year on your policy can provide for a great breath of coverages on your student's computer and protect your wallet. Nothing makes a dad feel better than to have that son or daughter call home and say, I lost my computer.

The second peril, and most people do not think about it, is loss of data. However, having a good backup solution can help to mitigate data losses. Two ways to take care of that issue easily.

a) Subscribe to a internet online backup solution – You may want to look into a solution like "Crash Plan", "Mozy", or "Carbonite". These are all online services that can backup your students laptop as long as they have a high speed internet connection. That way if the computer is lost, at least the thesis that the student was working on for weeks is not lost and can be recovered. – Disadvantage – The recovery can be slow depending on how much data needs to be restored. But slow recovery beats no recovery.

b) Do a localized backup – Purchase an external USB or Firewire hard drive that is at least as big or bigger than the internal hard drive in the laptop computer. For Mac users, the software to do the backups is free. "Time Machine" is built into Mac OS X so all you need to do is connect the external hard drive and follow the prompts. You'll be backing up in no time. The second choice which is my preferred choice is to use a "cloning" program called "Super Duper" which is free as well. The beauty to Super Duper is that it will clone your entire drive on the external and make it bootable. That way, if you lost your Mac laptop to theft or some other peril, when you got the replacement, you just clone it back and you are back in business. Also if you had a fellow student that had the same type of Mac, you could boot to his machine and finish your home work. – Disadvantage – You have to store the external backup separate from the laptop in a safe place so it wont be in the same peril as the laptop.

Musical Selection for your Harmony Direction

My job is interesting, challenging, fun at times. Yet still I look forward to ………

 - F R I D AY -

Just the name of the day of the week sounds good. Like Fried Fish, French Fries, Fried Egg, Fried Chicken. Anything with "Fri" in it sounds good!

"I love it when a plan comes together."

Hannibal from the "A Team" said it best and I agree. This past week, I helped with a great upgrade of Macintoshes for an associate. They had 2 PowerMac G5 Towers that the artists had been using. I love that box. It's so slick and cool even years later. I need to add one to my systems at home. I digress. So I replaced the 2 towers that had whopping 19" screens, 500 gigabyte hard drives and 2 gig of memory with three 27" iMacs with 1 terabyte hard drives and 12 gigabytes of memory. The kids are elated!

Prior to the upgrade I had each tower equipped with a 1 terabyte hard drive partition into 2 500 gigabyte sections. They used SuperDuper to backup their towers. So when it came time to install the new iMacs, they just copied over their data from the external drives, installed new apps (keeping the O/S clean) and away they went. Smooth Moove!

Now since they moved up to Mac OS 10.6.8 we will format the external 1 terabyte drives and make them into Time Machine backups that they will continue to store off site for the iMacs.

Make it even better,

In addition to the individual backups, I also added a 6 terabyte NAS – Network Attached Storage – for all of their archived data. I went with the Seagate brand Black Armor The artists burn archive projects to DVD but sometimes the artist may have to go back and pull something from the archive. The search through the DVD's to find the right one and then load it on the Mac took time. By adding the NAS, they will continue to burn the DVD and store it offsite, but they will have a copy on the NAS that they can access anytime just like another volume or drive on their Mac desktop. Easy Peasy!

So both an enhanced backup and archive solution is in place. I feel they are well protected in case of disaster and that is important.

Musical Selection for this week

Sometimes matching the theme perfectly doesn't always work but since things went well this week on the whole … Let's just dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEcXEk3zWXA

Radio ….. it what's for listening.

Saturday 8-6-2011 check out "The Internet Advisor"  we will be on the air from 4:00 to 6:00PM. Uncle Ed, The Fost, Geeky Gary, and I will be there for your weekly "Tech – Inject".  Tune in, Join In, and get your Tech On.

How many external drives do you normally have attached to your computer?

Two, three, maybe four? More?
If you have multiple external or network drives attached to the desktop computer or laptop it takes time to unmount them all.

For me, at any given time, I also have multiple external drives connected to my laptop and when it is time to pack up and go I often feel slowed down by the unmount process.

Dragging the disk icons to the eject icon, or un-mounting from Disk Utility, clicking on each icon beforehand gets a tad bit tedious, a.k.a. too many clicks to suit my needs.

BUT, I don’t dare be impatient enough to unplug before un-mounting any of the drives. I’ve unintentionally experienced that before and several times it has been catastrophic. A 4 day ordeal once, just thinking about it brings shivers.

So, I’m careful to unmount, but really would like the process to be faster. A little app that makes that happen for me is unDock.

unDock, by Flying Paper Software, available in the App Store for .99¢, will in one click or keyboard shortcut, instantly eject all of your mounted external and network drives. Taking the extra steps out of the normal procedure.

Also, if you have an external drive for Time Machine backups mounted, unDock, if necessary, will cancel an in-process Time Machine backup before it un-mounts the Time Machine drive.

unDock also has the ability to run scripts during this un-mounting process. You can set your desired options in the unDock Preferences.

As, stated, you can set up a keyboard keystroke in unDock and also display the unDock command in the OS menu. For my purposes, always, the less clicks the better. This basic utility is very helpful in making my workflow flow.

:::

Missed me ….. yeah me too.

The past couple of Fridays have been …. unique for me. Never worry. The rejoicing of the end of the week prevails. Always has, always will.

I had to back up to back up.

Once a quarter, I do a backup of a Mac that I have to tape for an offsite storage need. However when I went to perform this function, the backup software did not want to cooperate. I suspect that when I downloaded some updates, they may have affected the software for the backup software. I really did not have the time to research the "root cause" of this problem and decided to go another way to diagnose and or fix the problem of not being able to do the tape backup.

So what I ended up doing was booting to another drive with the same Mac OS X operating system and the same tape backup software. Once I did this, the tape backup software worked just fine. Since it was working, I backed up the drives I needed to first. Once those backups were complete, I then started working on fixing the original problem.

The point I am really trying to make here is this. By doing a complete backup of the hard drive and not just the data, I was able to get myself back up and running in a few minutes to resolve my problem. Had I only backed up the data portion, I would not have had this option that allowed me to continue.

So kids, you may want to consider having a "clone" backup of your current drive available to use in cases like mine. It will keep you up and running while you work on the problem you may have. Clone back ups are bootable backups.

Musical Selection

Gary U.S. Bonds made this Springsteen song popular. It was popular in the 80's but looks like it could make a comeback now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6kGGyJHhCA

Tune in to the radio…

Saturday 7/16-2011 check out "The Internet Advisor"  we will be on the air from 4:00 to 6:00PM. Tune in for good tech times.

Don't forget the MacGroup Detroit monthly meeting on Sunday.

You know you want to bee there!

Unlike some app add-ons that you use for a short while and then forget you have them, Simple Window sets is an app that I've been using continually for several years now, and here's why…

There are many, many times, while working on my computer that I have multiple Finder windows open. Why, because I will be working with multiple files in multiple locations.

Joining all the files together into one folder usurps the organization of the whole. And copying all the files I’m using to one location, to then use, brings up a can of worms that I don’t want to create. So hence, 4 or 5 Finder windows may be open and sized just to display the file or files used.

OK, I’ve learned to live with this, but the real issue for me is when I'm working on several different projects at one time, which is realistically, all the time. Even if I'm not working on more than one project at that moment, which does happen, to allow me access to certain files, the Finder window configurations will be different. So I have set up groupings, multiple groupings of Finder windows. Can this mean 8 to 10 Finder windows open at once? You betcha. 

Now, combine that visual with the application document windows, 9 or more applications running at one time, and you will see me on an average day. Digging through Finder windows is not my idea of happy, happy, joy, joy, effective time management no matter how good I am at keyboard shortcuts to how/hide/next or toggle.

Simple Window Sets
I was browsing through the third party apps on the Apple site and came across a few productivity tools that piqued my interest, but once tried, didn’t seem to fit a defined need. Then I came across Simple WindowSets, and smiled.

Simple WindowSets allows you to create and manage Finder window sets. You can create as many sets as you need, in any configuration needed. Then select any set to work with at any time and toggle back and forth between them. Tile them. Close them all. Even use, keyboard shortcuts to quickly get to the set you want.

When Simple WindowSets creates a Finder window set it remembers locations, physical sizes, and the current view(s) of the Finder windows; whether it be list, icons, column, cover flow, sorted, etc. If you need to change the configuration once you’ve created it, you can add or remove what is needed and update the set.

So you can have a set of Finder windows for your particular projects, specific applications, games, music, websites, etc. As a bonus, you can even create custom icons for your sets for quick visual identification, to add to the Simple WindowSets menu. These files have to be in the .png, .tif, icns, or .jpg formats. A Simple WindowSets icon in the menu bar allows you quick access to the different Finder window configurations you've created.

I love apps that do exactly what they say they will and do it well. This app does. While jostling around your Finder windows may not seem to be a big deal to some, for the rest of us, this app fills a definite need and is a welcome addition to my computer.

Simple WindowSets has a fully-functional, 14-day free trial time period, after that the asking price is $12.95.

It's one of the best $12.95 purchases you could ever make. 

:::

Thanks go to Samuel Gibbs over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog for bringing HazeOver to my attention. HazeOver is a $.99 app from the Apple App Store that does one thing, but does it well. It dims non-active windows. You set the amount of dimming, from a mere 10% all the way to a very dark 90%. I don't know about anyone else, but on the occasions when I have a bunch of windows open, I have a tendency to inadvertently click beyond the menu bar and activate a window that I really don't want.

At 40%, this dims those background windows just enough that I don't do it. So simple. Better yet — Maxim Ananov, creator of this nifty utility is open to suggestions and feature requests from all users. 

The only goofy thing I've found is that with DragThing running, it dims the desktop, even with no windows open. It appears that this will be addressed in a future update. My Easter egg desktop, as it looks with HazeOver and as it should look:

No comments about my cluttered desktop, please. It's stuff in progress that will be dealt with soon. I promise. Oh, and DragThing? It's the app/doc launcher/organizer that I have used for more years than I care to admit. Utilities come and utilities go, but DragThing is always present on my Macs.