thehumantouch.ca

Check out this post from my one of my other sites The Photo Video Guy on the incredible Nik Snapseed for Macintosh

http://thephotovideoguy.ca/?p=174

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, yet another backup lecture.

So the three rules of backup are;

1. Backup as often as you can not afford to lose your work.
2. Backing up without doing test restores is like not backing up at all.
3. Nothing is backed up unless it is in three places and one of those places had better be off-site.

Back when I was accountable for Corporate IT, we paid good money to off-site storage facilities to store and facilitate tape rotation for us. The point of off-site being that if you lost your facility, or access to your facility, you could still get to your business data.

When photos and videos, music, art and other content now make up the lion’s share of our storage consumption, acting a bit like a business is a good idea. I will assume you are doing #1 and have at least tried #2 but like many people, you may not be consistent with #3.

For #1, you have to have an automated backup solution in place. I don’t actually care what solution you choose but it must happen without you thinking about it or having to initiate an action. This means it runs in the background as what we UNIX dorks call a daemon. It happens automatically, usually based on a schedule or event. If you are a Macintosh user, this is Time Machine and while there are those who hate Time Machine, it has saved the bacon of tons of people with better things to do than gripe. My daughter’s HD in her MacBook died this week after three years of service. Since she plugs the machine in to charge every night, she got in the habit of plugging in an external USB2 disk. When the drive started making that tap tap tap death knell sound, I just bought a new, larger and faster drive, pulled the old one, put in the new one and booted from the Time Machine volume. I partitioned the drive and then let Time Machine do its restore. One hour and twenty-nine minutes later, she was back in business. No rocket science required on your part. Similar solutions exist for users running Windows or Linux.

For #2, it means making a decision that on a regular basis you will do a recovery of a file or folder or full disk to prove that backup and restore work before you need them. I recall a customer from some years back that had been scrupulous about daily differential backups, tape rotation and offsite storage, but when disaster hit, they discovered that their backups had “said” that they were working but actually had been writing out garbage. Fortunately for them, they had recently implemented a new RAID array and had not yet wiped the old one, so they only lost about a week of data. That was an expensive lesson that could have been much worse. Do this or don’t, your call.

#3 seems to be where things halt. There are a number of cloud type backup services out there. I have tried a number of them and for a number of reasons, I selected Crashplan. It has never let me down, surfaces #1 and #2 as needed and gives me that off-site answer. When you first set up cloud backup, remember it’s going to take SOME TIME, because your upload bandwidth allocation does not look like your download bandwidth unless specifically negotiated with your provider. Once that initial load completes though, only changes get moved and that happens with simplicity and efficiency. For example, one of my roles is being a professional photographer. Individual RAW images from the Hasselblad are just over 50mb, so a shoot of 120 images (pretty common) is over 600mb. Yes I could simple burn a CD for each shoot and stuff them in a deposit box, but that would require action on my part. I copy the raw files to a Drobo and then import them into Phocus and deposit them in the DNG format on a library external drive. Crashplan sees the new files and starts uploading in the background. I don’t think about it, but I did notice today that between edited videos, music and photographs, I am at about 150GB of storage at Crashplan. Their pricing model works for me and for the number of machines I use. Crashplan does handle external drives where many of the competitors see this as an additional cash grab. Pick whatever service you want, I recommend Crashplan over others, but it’s your call, but if you want to say “I am safely backed up”, you must have some form of offsite that doesn’t require you remembering to do something.

Evolution can be a wonderful thing, but when you need to interact with an older thing, evolution, or in the case of Lion’s change to SMB2 from SMB1, can be a real pain in the ass.

Years ago, I bought a NAS called the Buffalo Terastation that had an entire TERABYTE of available storage. So I put stuff up there that I might need someday, and used it as a backup target for the odd process or a Windows machine, or for Windows and Linux ISOs. I don’t need to get there often so for a month or so, I did not notice that I could not get there from OS X Lion.

When I did try to connect using Go | Connect to Server in the Finder, I got some pretty useless message about the server having the wrong configuration. Since I had not changed the server, I figured this was something Apple had broken or done intentionally in Lion. After some digging in the logs, I discovered it was intentional. And while it’s a PITA, Apple didn’t do it first since Microsoft broke connectivity to SMB1 shares in Windows 7. Unlike Apple though, Microsoft documented what parameter to change to make things work as they used to, albeit with some deprecation of security. SMB2 basically dumps share based authentication in favour of user based authentication. Technically this makes a lot of sense. But if you have a device or devices that still work everyday but for which there is no update to firmware to enable SMB2, you are basically going to be screwed without dinner or flowers in advance.

muCommander to the Rescue

I remember and used the original Norton Commander, back in the days when Peter Norton was a guy and not a poster for Symantec. The original Norton Commander improved efficiency for legions of DOS and network admins. I even remember a couple of offerings for Mac OS and early versions of OS X that looked and felt like NC, down to the DOS blue background.

For all intents and purposes, that’s what muCommander is. A cross-platform file manager that makes file management simple so long as you are comfortable with the old file/directory model from DOS. That’s not to say it isn’t Mac-like because it is, but much more in a “list-view” kind of way. What is most important to me, is that it supports all manner of network share attachment in a single interface including Bonjour, NFS, FTP, SMB, SFTP and HTTP as well as the ability to see shares that advertise themselves using the classic LMBROWSER services. It shows folders as

pIf you’re like me, you may have encountered the really annoying part where you go to turn on Personal Hotspot cause you really need it, and SURPRISE, it’s not there./p
pSince this has happened to me more than once on both the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, and I have figured out a solution, I thought I would share it with you./p
pThere are two steps that have consistently worked for me./p
p1.  Power cycle the phone.  Like in really power cycle, hold down the click button and the home button and wait for the Apple to appear./p
p2.  If Personal Hotspot still doesn’t appear, then go to Settings | General and scroll right down to the bottom and select Reset.  Now here’s where read twice press once helps.  Select Rest Network Settings and be patient while the phone does it’s thing.  Now be patient some more and let it power up and be powered up for about a minute.  Now go into Settings | General | Network and enable Personal Hotspot./p
pThat’s all she wrote.  While it is majorly annoying to lose the functionality, this method has worked for me every time to get it back.  And BTW, if your carrier does not support tethering or they are and its turned off for you, don’t have big expectations that this will work.  IOS has been made smarter and many of the doorways to tethering without a tethering plan appear to be closed./p

piPad?  Functional in the 70′s?  Know what a Moog is?/p
pIf yes to any of the above, run do not walk to the App Store and plunk down your 99 cents for Animoog!/p
pI had the good fortune to be a teen in the 70′s and to be introduced to the MiniMoog by high school cohort and incredible keyboardist Don Baird.  Don actually had one of the first MiniMoog synthesizers and provided me an awesome education on the power of synths.  These were the days when regular synths were monstrous and most often single voiced.  The Mini Moog was sort of portable and was incredible for its time.  Don supported many of our shows in school and provided the crew I led then with many useful tools including the oft repeated but never equalled “Sapphire Bullets of Love”./p
pAnimoog brings the synth to the iPad in a way that makes a non-keyboardist swoon.  It can be a regular keyboard, emulate a set of Taurus bass pedals and because of a plethora of presets to start from be either an incredible exercise in creativity (my story and I’m sticking to it) or a wonderful waste of time.  I heard about the app from Ken Ray who recommended it on a recent MacBreak Weekly, and I was buying it before he finished talking.  Word is that it will go to its regular price of $30 in relatively short order so grab it while it is still 99 cents./p
pI like the look and feel of Animoog.  It replicates the old style twist knobs for its controllers and the keyboard switches layouts depending on the preset you start with. Each of the keys is effectively a variable controller so you can tap or slide up and down to get different tones.  Some presets disable the slide capability which is as it should be.  I may be wrong but I thought I could even discern pressure sensitivity./p
pEven if you aren’t a musician, you will find great fun in Animoog.  Check out Filtatron while you are at it./p
pInfo at a href=”http://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog”http://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog/a/p

Drobo customer support was really good in my ongoing challenges and the replacement unit works great on eSATA with the Tempo Sonnet card.  With one exception.  As was reported by subscribers to this site, booting your Mac Pro with the Drobo S connected via eSATA and turned on will give you a lengthy exposure to the grey screen.  Despite my complaints to the Drobo folks, they have concluded that this is unique to my install, despite there being multiple users reporting the same problem, at least to me.  They have also suggested not using the Tempo Sonnet card despite it having been one of two listed as supported devices with the other not being well supported on Snow Leopard.  I did for yucks try the LaCie SATA II PCIe card but it wasn’t seen by the OS at all so I went back to the Sonnet.  I have another eSATA drive connected to the Sonnet card and the Mac Pro boots fine with it connected and powered on so my conclusion is there is something not right in the eSATA code on the Drobo S.

So long as you don’t mind having to physically startup the Drobo S following the computer booting, it works fine via eSATA, but if this is a pain for you, you can go back to the much slower FireWire 800.  Don’t bet heavily on USB3 support on Lion since LaCie prefers to play ostrich and say all is right in Lion with their driver (it’s not).

So caveat emptor and all that.  Unfortunately eSATA is the fastest external drive interface thus far for the Mac Pro, and until a version comes out with Thunderbolt support you’re kinda stuck if you want eSATA and simple fault tolerance.  Drobos premise is superb, I just wish they would fix their products to work with the shipping OS.

With the recent release of their M4 series of SSD drives, the purchase price of an SSD of enough size to replace the spinning drive in my 17″MacBook Pro finally arrived.  I ordered a drive from the local reseller and it arrived in a week and a half.  Purchase price was $899 before tax, not a trivial amount, but I really believed it would make a difference in the 17″ MBP that runs Core i7 CPUs and has 8GB of RAM when it comes to application launch and getting information off the disk.

I used the instructions from the great people at iFixit (link) so the process went smoothly and correctly.  You will need the tools that they recommend for greatest efficiency.  The small Phillips and small Torx drivers will be available at better hardware stores, but many computer component stores will also carry one of those ten zillion bits and holder kits for under $20 and you will use them again..

Total time to install the 512GB SSD was under 30 minutes.  I then put my original spinning drive into a Thermotake drive holder and connected it via USB2.  Then I booted from the original drive and did a clone onto the new SSD.  That got all my files and apps over and the MBP now booted off the SSD, and was as I expected really fast.  What was missing is the Lion Recover Partition so see my post on solving that problem.  Suffice to say it works fine and I know that the Recovery Partition exists on the SSD because I was able to turn on Filevault 2 disk encryption on the system, which will not work without a recovery partition.

Filevault 2 does change up the boot sequence a bit.  You get the login screen first and after logging in, the machine goes through the boot process.  Startup and shutdown do take longer with Filevault 2, not horribly so, but definitely longer.  The real thing to note is that bluetooth devices are not there when the login screen appears, so I have had to attach a USB mouse to my MacPro because the Magic Trackpad does not activate until the boot sequence completes.

So was the upgrade worth it?  Absolutely!

For my work with video and photo editing disk performance does matter and I feel like I have added a couple more years of production life to my 2010 MacBook Pro.  Speed is good.

Despite the risk of sounding like a teen, OMG!!!

The brilliant software folks at Autodesk who have expended on the standard of AutoCAD into iPad and iPod apps, as well as incredible drawing and rendering tools like Maya have released an absolutely incredible Mac app called Motion FX.

There are great sample videos to check out as well as stills on the Mac App Store.  Here’s an example;  Best of all?  It’s free.  Get it at http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/motion-fx/id449597246?mt=12

There are always new apps showing up on the Mac App store and keeping track is hard work.

If you use Wikipedia, and you have a Mac, you’re going to love Wikibot.  It’s on the Mac App Store for 99 cents (link) and brings the Wikipedia experience to your Macintosh.  The UI is clean and minimalist, performance is excellent and it just works.  No bloat, no exploding hippo graphics, just functionality.

It’s great so support the author Evan Rosenfeld and buy it.

This was easier than I thought it would be.

Post Lion Install, I used my tried and true method to clone the boot disk to a larger physical disk to go up in size without a lot of jerking around.  Well as noted in the prior post, this misses the Lion Recovery Partition (at least at time of writing – I expect smart folks to address this in their clone tools soon enough).  I wasn’t sure so I tried to turn on Filevault and it advised it could not be installed.  Definitely an indicator that there was no recovery partition since Filevault 2 REQUIRES it.

I searched the webs and did not find a solution so expecting the worst case scenario, I ensured that I had both a current Time Machine and Super Duper backup, and then re-ran the Mac OS X Lion Installer.  If yours got erased during the initial Lion install, just go to the App Store and hold the Option key down when clicking on your Purchases page and you will be able to download it again.  Then make a copy or three and proceed with the re-install.

You’ll go through the entire Lion installation again, it takes about the same amount of time as the first time.  It will remove any drivers and programs it does not like again, and any OS specific upgrades or driver changes you installed post Lion will need to be done again, as you would expect.

Upon restart, I let the Mac Pro boot completely and then went to turn on FileVault 2.  No issues at all and it is happily encrypting in the background as I type this.