OK, last night the President presented his State of the Union address. Today, I'd like to direct you to The State of the Internet, courtesy of The Oatmeal. Warning – the site sometimes has some strong language. This is a site I subscribe to via RSS, because it's almost always a riot.
OK, I'm copping out a bit this week – I've been sick for several days. So eat yer oatmeal and no backtalk!
I have to say that I'm hooked on the App Store. The biggest reason? It's oh so easy to add the same apps on both my iMac and my MacBook. Buy it on one, and it will show up in the list of purchases on the other and tell me whether or not I've installed it. It's easy to see, in this screen capture, items purchased on my iMac that still need to be installed on my MacBook.
Want to know at a glance if any downloaded apps need to be updated? A quick glance at the Updates icon shows how many apps have updates waiting.
What's missing from the App Store? Try before you buy. If you see something that looks good, but you're not quite sure, don't buy it. Go to the associated website first and see if you can download a demo version. Check the price there, too. It might be different.
Apple is known for making products that are easy to use. One thing they make almost too easy is the ability to Migrate your older computer to your new one. The Migration Assistant is a dream come true for anyone upgrading their Mac. You can either connect your old Mac to your new one using a cable or Migrate from your Time Machine or clone backup. There is one problem with this great feature though. I've been migrating my notebooks from one to the other for as long as I can remember. I went from the early PowerBooks to the MacBook Pros and have had several models of those. Each time I have successfully Migrated from the old computer to the New one and while I haven't had any major issues, I have been wondering for the past couple of years "just how much old baggage do I really have on this thing?" Like anyone I've installed software and deleted software, created documents and forgot about them, downloaded stuff and never trashed it when I was done. Unfortunately back in the day most Mac apps didn't have uninstallers. So you were on your own or had to use a utility to find all the various pieces to discard. Guess what? I didn't really do a whole lot of that. It was evident in my Applications, Library and Preference folders. It was like walking through an attic seeing files and folders for Apps that I hadn't used in years (ie. AppleWorks). I was seeing preferences for older versions of Apps that wouldn't even run on my current system if they were still installed.
If you took everything out of your garage, basement or attic would you put everything you just took out back in again?
It's (Past) Time To Start Over
The last time I started over, which means wiping the hard drive clean and installing everything fresh was back in the late 90's when I was forced to. I had my first major hard drive crash with no real backup to speak of. I remember it like it was yesterday (I still have the scar). I came home one Friday afternoon in the summer of 1998 and there it was, my Norton Utilities 4.0 diskette had arrived in the mail. Although there was nothing wrong with my PowerBook, I decided to pop the disc in and do a check. Some preventative maintenance if you will. The software reported that there was a problem with my drive and I opted to let it repair it. About half way through the repair process the progress bar froze. I let it sit for a couple of hours and still had no movement. I decided that it was in fact frozen and I rebooted.
I got the lovely flashing question mark which meant that my operating system was toast. I jumped in the car and drove to a local computer store to get some recovery software and I was able to recover about 10% of my data (at random). There was no choice at that point but to reformat and reinstall everything. For the next few months I would go to launch a document and remember, "oh yeah, I lost that in the crash." Needless to say I've been a fan of backing up ever since and have never touched a Norton product anymore 
This time I wanted to start over on my own. I wanted to backup my drive, reformat it and install ONLY the software that I currently use and the documents that I currently need. I actually did three backups. I did my normal Time Machine backup, I updated my clone backup (using SuperDuper!) that I normally travel with and I made a second clone backup to store on the shelf for the next 6-12 months as a just in case. After all the backups were done I de-authorized iTunes and a couple of other Apps that were authorized to my specific system. I booted with the Snow Leopard disc that came with my 2010 MacBook Pro and used Disk Utilities to reformat my boot partition. After that I reinstalled the OS from scratch and told it NOT to copy/migrate anything over from the backup. It was both scary and exciting at the same time. It was like getting a New Mac for the first time all over again.
You spend months if not years tweaking things
The thing that I was most concerned with was losing all those little preferences that I had set over the years and tweaks to my system. I clearly put way more value on this than I needed to. After the OS was installed and I ran all the system updates and then I proceeded to install fresh copies of the software that I use every day. I installed a few drivers from fresh downloads for things like my Xerox printer and my Wacom tablet. I setup the preferences as I went along and it wasn't bad at all. I then plugged in one of the clones and copied over all of my music and photos. I also copied over my current work in progress from the documents folder, not the entire Documents folder. Since I sync to MobileMe, my calendars and contacts came down just fine into iCal and Address Book. My email accounts are iMAP based so I did't have to worry about missing any new mail in this process. I did copy over my old Mail folder for the archived mail.
The saviors
The biggest savior in this process was 1Password. I didn't want to bring over the old system Keychain file as I knew it had a ton of outdate stuff/certificates in it. However, there was no way that I was going to remember all my passwords on the sites I'm registered with. I reinstalled 1Password from a fresh download and then used my FREE Dropbox.com account (which I also reinstalled their software fresh) to sync back over all my 1Password passwords and logins. It just worked! 1Password also made it MUCH EASIER to do my software reinstalls because I also use it to store my Software Serial numbers. Everything in one place!
A very pleasant surprise – Time Machine picked up where it left off. I backup via Time Machine to my network OS X Server. So I'm not plugging in an external drive to do it. I know that Time Machine in the past wasn't very forgiving if you reformatted your drive and wanted to backup again. In most cases it would want to start a NEW backup instead of reusing the old one. However, by keeping the computer name the same, Time Machine was able to continue using the same backup data (sparse file) as before. Granted it took all night to figure out everything, make enough room on the drive, etc., but now I have the ability to go back to December 17th (my oldest TM backup) and grab anything I may need without plugging in one of my clone drives.
The Bottom Line
I figured this process would take about a week to get everything back to the way I like it Actually it only took about a day and a half! When I started the process I had about 60GB's of free hard drive space. Now I have about 200GBs of free space. This is largely in part of not reinstalling a bunch of Apps that I never use and not copying over gigabytes of documents that were several years old. I still have all the photos and music/movies I had before and to this day I'm not missing anything. I thought I would be tethered to that clone drive for several days dragging stuff over as I needed it, but I was able to disconnect the drive by day three.
I'm finally past the thing that I dreaded doing for so long figuring that I never had the down time and it feels great. My computer is more responsive and it's Awesome knowing that I'm not dragging around so much unnecessary crap. While I probably will Migrate here and there in the future, I definitely won't ever go this long again without starting over! If you have been migrating from computer to computer for two or more systems, it's probably time to consider a fresh start. I would like to go to an every other computer Migration to Fresh Start ratio.
Oh Baby was it ever.
If there is one thing that I seem to lack sometimes it's discipline!
It's the one thing that if you can master it, you can master just about anything.
It's also the one thing that is most vital to BACKUP.
You see BACKUPS on a REGULAR basis require DISCIPLINE.
But the rewards from that practice is worth far more than the costs of maintaining that DISCIPLINE.
When and if you have a data disaster with your computer, the recovery will be that much quicker and less stressful as long as you maintain your BACKUP process. But maintaining that process will require DISCIPLINE.
1) Decide what data needs to be backed up on a regular basis.
2) Select a media to do your backups on that is appropriate for you data and the amount of time you can stand before you have to have a full recovery from a disaster.
3) Make MULTIPLE copies of that backup ( at least 2 ) and store at least one of them off site ( away from the computer you backed up ) at a trusted location.
4) ROTATE your backups ( This why you need multiple media and multiple copies ) Oh yeah it will cost a little extra but just factor that into your budget when you purchase a computer. It's part of the total package of ownership.
5) Periodically TEST your BACKUPS to make sure you can in fact recover from a disaster. Remember, a BACKUP you can't RESTORE, is not a BACKUP at all.
In future blogs, I will be taking each of these 5 steps and breaking them down further to assist in understanding and creating a backup and restore plan.
DISCIPLINE
I believe the below video should help to understand the value of discipline. Maybe it's just give you a laff. For some, perhaps a flashback of youth. Enjoy!
On The Radio
Saturday 1-22-2011 check out "The Internet Advisor" we will be on the air from 6:00 to 8:00PM. Bringing to you great tech radio with the 3 — Foster, Gary and Ed. Tune in for good tech times.
Do you tire of looking for a Wi-Fi hotspot to connect your iPod Touch?
It's 2011 already…
Surfing the Internet shouldn't be so hard to do no matter what the device or where you are.
But, that's just my opinion.
And possibly the opinion of Sprint as well.
Or maybe just a smart move to step into the iDevice craze.
Sprint is aiming to make your iPod Touch, a Wi-Fi device, into a 3G device, in a round about way, with the "ZTE Peel™."
If you live in the Metro Detroit area and are looking for an awesome learning experience in Photoshop CS5, InDesign CS5 or Acrobat 9 and X Professional, start here, with me.
Winter Continuing Ed Classes: Photoshop, InDesign and a 4-hour Acrobat 9 Professional are about to start at Schoolcraft College next week.
In Photoshop you will learn detailed information on the following topics:
- Adobe Bridge
- Adobe Downloader
- Layer Masks
- Color Replacement
- Filters
- Clipping Masks
- Photo Correction techniques
- Portrait Retouching
- Layering
- Camera Raw
- and more…
Courses (Level 1 and Level 2) are 6 weeks each, held Wednesday's at 6pm – 8:40pm
So I saved up my shekels for a while, and finally was able to afford a new MacPro. So I dutifully hooked up my Time Machine backup from the old desktop to read into the new one and ran out the door (late for an appointment). Migration tip #1 - *make time* for this. I needed to pull disks from the old machine into the new one, as well as get the new machine set up in hurry, and still get out the door.
Imagine my surprise a few days later when I tried to fire up Parallels and it couldn't find my virtual machine files. Where did they go? Well, guess what directory I was excluding from Time Machine. VMs are a bad choice for Time Machine, because you can fire one up, change one small file, and you need to back up 20 GB. So normally you would exclude them. Of course, I had other backups – until I moved all my disks around to build out the other machine and started wiping stuff out. I was fortunate that I had older versions on another disk (my VMs don't change all that much – the only one that does is on another machine). So I lucked out there.
Then I fired up Outlook, and it wanted the serial number again. Of course, I have the disk right…uh, no, it's not there, it's..uh..missing. Fortunately, I put it in a secure note inside my Keychain, so I was able to recover from that. (Why didn't I use the serial number recover tool I wrote about earlier? It doesn't work on Office 2011 yet.) Then I had to re-setup my mail connection to work. Why? Guess what else was excluded from TM backups? Yup, the Microsoft User Data directory. This is because Entourage, from the older version of Office, kept all it's mail in one giant file, and, just like the VMs, you didn't want 10 versions a day just because you checked your mail on got a piece of spam. I was safe again because all my mail is on our work server, so it just had to re-sync.
The next fun issue? Final Cut Pro. Now, I don't use it much anymore now that I have Premiere Pro. But I do have a few older projects that I don't want to re-do. Also, I use the MPEG playback component. Well, none of that stuff was working – MPEG playback was broken and Final Cut wanted my serial number. I really don't know *why* that happened! I wasn't excluding anything along those lines that I know of. At least (after a bit of digging) I found the disks and the serial number for that.
So Tip #2 for migrating – have all your important software handy to re-install (including serial numbers), just in case something doesn't work right with Migration Assistant. If I hadn't been in a hurry, I would have had my old backup disk still available for a week or two, but I wanted to get things changed around quickly.
Tip#3 – use a full backup if available, not just a TM backup. Yes, it did work for most of my stuff, but a few of these problems wouldn't have occurred if I had used my full backup (I suspect I would still have had the Final Cut problem).
Today's clip is not an actual video of the band, as most of the ones I found of live performances were – um – filled with salier language before the music than I prefer for this blog.
At the last meeting, someone noticed that I had a personalized lock screen on my iPad and asked how it was done, so I thought others might be interested, too. It's fairly simple.
First, start with something that can create text. For this demo, I used Pages, and selected a colorful poster template, then deleted the extras that I didn't need, adding in my own text. When it was ready, I did a quick screen capture. (Press the home and power buttons at the same time.)
Next, go to Settings and select Brightness & Wallpaper, then click in the Wallpaper window.
There are several companies out there that will let you create and design your own wall calendars via their websites. As many of you know iPhoto has this feature built-in too. Although I don't use iPhoto as my photo manager (I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3), I do go through the extra step each year of exporting out my favorite potential calendar pics from Lightroom and import them into iPhoto just to produce my calendar. I do this because iPhoto has two features that I have yet to find in other services. The first one came in a few years ago and it was one that I couldn't believe that no one else offered.
It's the simple ability of allowing you to put a photo on the actual days of the week. I do this for family member's birthdays. When iPhoto got this feature a few versions ago, I said "duh, why doesn't anyone else get the need for this?"
The next feature is the integration with iCal. Since I keep my calendars in iCal, iPhoto can automatically import any of my calendars onto my printed calendar too. I do this with my Birthdays calendar from Address Book birthdays and the US Holidays Calendar. I also import the MacGroup calendar too so that all the meeting dates are printed on the calendar. Even if you import a calendar and you don't want certain items from it on the printed calendar (ie. meetings that may change), you can delete the individual items that you don't want after the calendar has been imported.
You might think that this is an unfair advantage that Apple has over other companies because the two apps are running on the Mac. It's not unfair at all. If other calendar printing services really wanted to offer this they could allow you to export out your dates from any calendar that you use or even the iCal format and import them in via the web.
Start it and end it where you want
Lastly I got off to a late start this year. Normally I do the calendars and submit the order in time to get them back by January 1. This time I was behind schedule and I realized that with the holidays and other December activities that I never have time to work on it in December. So I opted to add on a 13th month this time. My new calendar runs from January 2011 to January 2012 giving me a few extra weeks of breathing room before doing the February 2012 – January 2013 calendars next year
You can now buy iPhoto '11 separately for only $14.99 here from the Mac 
Welcome to yet another FRIDAY!
I have been a big promoter of BACKUPS. Perhaps you have never noticed it but some reason, I find it important that you as a computer user, should backup your data periodically. If you do that, you'll find that if you have some kinda catastrophe with your computer (even if you did not induce it) you'll be able to recover from it.
Old School vs New School
When I say "Old School" backups, I am speaking of the type of backups that you do at you home or office where you backup your data on some sort of media ( Tape, Hard drive, DVD,CD, Flash drive) and then store that backup in a safe place away from the computer. One great thing about these kind of backups is that you can do some of them in a manner that makes the backup "bootable"
"New School" backups are when you use one of the many "online" backups. These backup solutions are commercial and the connect to your computer via some sort of client software and then it moves you specified data over the internet to their servers where your data is stored. It is also there for you to pull back in case you need to restore it. These backups however cannot be "bootable".
Old School is for the really big and important stuff.
Due the problem with speed and time, I tend to stay away from online backups. Oh I used a type of online backup for small files, but it's really just a "drag and drop" to an online file store.
The other thing that concerns me is that if that online backup provider should go out of business, you have to have fair warning, and enough time to pull your data back. If all the stars aren't lined up, you are gonna lose your valuable data.
Also sometimes you'll find that the online backups are as comprehensive as you would like. A fellow I know found out that a large online backup provider doesn't allow for backup of hard drives attached to your computer externally. That would definitely be a "show stopper" for me.
Just my opinion. Make the backup choice that is best for you.
Musical Interlude
Here some Old School tune-age for you.
Check out the Internet Advisor Show on WJR 760 AM on Saturday between 6:00 and 8:00 PM. The guys will be there talking and answering questions about all things computer and internet. I however will not be with Foster, Gary, and Ed. I am working the Mid-America Skating Competition. Go Figure,, no Go Syncro!
Don't Miss the Macgroup Monthly Meeting on Sunday 1-16-2011 at 3:00 PM – Be There!
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