Very big Dantz Retrospect bug (OS X)

MacInTouch Home PageJust a quick warning to Mac OS X users running Retrospect 6.0.178. If you're backing up an entire drive and hope to restore it one day, do NOT do an incremental backup. This version of Retrospect doesn't recognize when symbolic links have changed the file to which they point. So it doesn't back them up.

This is unlikely to cause problems for personal home directories and such, but it has a disastrous effect when restoring a complete Mac OS X install, if you've done any software updates after your first backup in the set. You'll need to reinstall the OS.

The easy solution (until Dantz issues a fix) is to force Retrospect to backup ALL files, not just changed files.

(The technical reason for the problem is that when Apple updates frameworks in software updates, they update symbolic links named 'Current' to point to the new version. Retrospect backs up the new version, but fails to back up the updated symbolic link. Thus, on restore you end up with the new version, but the old symbolic link -- pointing to a no-longer-present version.)

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Wow. I wonder if this is true for older versions too. Maybe I should give up on using Retrospect for a full system backup -- and focus on a data only backup. I can use CarbonCopy Cloner to do a clone periodically, and otherwise only backup the user directory.

Airport Express and Third Party Routers

Airport Express and Third Party Routers

An elegant web site dedicated to Airport Express interoperability with 3rd party routers.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Americans flee as hurricane nears

Tim Forster, of the UK charity Oxfam, on the island of Grenada, said: 'This is the worst devastation I have ever witnessed.

'Ninety percent of houses have been torn to pieces and there is waste strewn across the whole island.'

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I've read that this season represents a return to historic hurricaine patterns, and that the global warming component is relatively small (but growing). I wonder how confident climatologists are in those statements.

Capturing video on a Mac - EyeTV

Capturing video on a Mac - EyeTV

This author likes EyeTV. Interesting reference on how the capturing and publishing was done. Focus on TV capture -- using Mac as a PVR.

MacTheRipper: backing up the kid's DVDs

MacTheRipper

All you need on the mac is mac the ripper (decss for the mac) which is free and dragon burn--9.95 for a competitive upgrade.

The only other thing you might need is a compression program if the movie is more than the one-sided dvd capacity (single side capacity is 4.7GB, some movies come on DVDs that are double sided and can be up to 9.5GB -- but most consumer DVD drives won't burn double sided DVDs), but mac the ripper lets you extract only the movie and not the extras if you want.

Works good to back up the kids dvd's that they inevitably ruin.

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Mac the Ripper removes Macrovision protection, so you can copy from DVD to tape. It will be good to have a way to backup the kid's DVDs, or to play on the VCR (rather than buy another DVD). All legal so long as its our use.

Update 1/2/06: the original site has been shut down, but one can download 2.6.6 via VersionTracker.

Formating a hard drive as FAT under OS X

FWFL_User_Guide.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Your SmartDisk hard drive can be formatted and partitioned using Apple’s Disk Utility, located in your Utilities folder. Under Disk and Volumes Selected, select the appropriate drive, and click on the Partition tab. Under Volume Information, expand the Format field and choose Free Space. Click on the Erase tab, expand the Volume Format Field, and click MS-DOS File System. Click Erase and wait for the Erase to complete. Your drive is now ready to be connected to a Windows operating system.

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I didn't think this could be done any more under 10.3, but I didn't choose the "Free Space" tab. I need to test this.

SmartDisk Drives: Firewire FireFly and CrossFire

SmartDisk - Capture, Share and Preserve Digital Content

I've heard of some good results with these. I need to figure out who makes their bridge chips. I did see this on their web page, it means they don't use the dreaded Oxford chipset:

We are aware of reports that using the newest release of Mac OS X, "Panther," can result in data loss when used with certain types of external FireWire hard drives, notably those built with certain type of chips.

None of SmartDisk's FireWire hard drives use these types of chips. Therefore your SmartDisk FireWire hard drive should not be affected by the problems reported with Panther. No hard drive firmware update is needed (or is available) for SmartDisk's hard drives.

OS X: failure to mount a CD, cannot eject CD

OSXFAQ - Technical News and Support for Mac OS X

Every once in a while a CD would not mount on the desktop but would be visable by disk utility. It would happen with original CD's, Data CD's, Music CD's and burned CD's.

I would try restarting etc... nothing would get it to show up! I tried restoring the permissions, nothing. Disk utility was not finding any problems either.

Finally out of desperation I decided to log in as a fake user and see if that user could see the disc... and it could!

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I never had this problem -- until very recently. Some update has messed up drive mounting.

I wonder if this plays a role in the problems many have with mounting firewire drives.

This tip does work, but not if one uses fast user switching to switch to an already logged in user. It's only on initial login that the drive can be seen, and ejected or mounted!

macosxhints - Use Disk Utility to repair FAT32 formatted disks

macosxhints - Use Disk Utility to repair FAT32 formatted disks: "You can use Disk Utilty in Panther to repair MS-DOS (FAT32) formatted disks."

Apparently it can fix disks that data recovery systems have problems with. Weird.

macosxhints - SMB mount failure workaround

macosxhints - SMB mount failure workaround

What I could do was create a folder in my home directory (let's call it XYZ) and then, in Terminal, use the following:

mount_smbfs -W DOMAIN //USER:PASSWORD@MOUNT/SHARE /Users/YOURUSERNAME/XYZ

Replace the words in CAPS with the appropriate ones for your circumstances. This essentially mounts the share and connects it to the named folder. Which when double-clicked on will browse that share.

Kanguru Slim FC-RW - Flash Card Burner, Portable DVD Player and CD Burner!

Kanguru Slim FC-RW - Flash Card Burner, Portable DVD Player and CD Burner!

A complement to a digital camera when traveling. Fringe benefit is use it to view DVDs in the hotel room. Main benefit though is burning CD without laptop, review pictures on hotel TV.

Filehand: Another fulltext indexing solution, including PDF

Filehand Home Page

Interesing. I love Lookout, but I need something for the rest of my file system. I'll try it next week.

Snippets 1997 - before there were blogs

Snippets Explained (Version 2)

This is one of the oldest and least reconstructed pages on my personal web site. Google found it very quickly. It was first authored in Feb 1997 (my site began @ Jan/Feb 1995, initially at the University of Minnesota).

This site was about creating quick bits of information with a simple ontology to organize their publication. It was to be a cross between the fragment oriented PIMs of the 1980s and early 1990s and the web.

I didn't have the expertise to build the right solutions, and I had other priorities. I forgot about those "snippet" pages. Until I stated messing with del.icio.us. Ontology, fragments, keyworks ... then there are my blogs, esp. Quick Notes ...

Yeah, there's a resemblance.

Tinderbox, though, is closest to the snippets vision (though I don't use it; Quick Notes + Google is good).

Del.icio.us is interesting though. Gotta figure how to work it in to the mix...

del.icio.us/jfaughnan

del.icio.us/jfaughnan

Here is my del.icio.us set of collaborative bookmarks, with appropriate recursion to this Quick Notes Blog. I like the way the tag list is growing. I use jfaughnan and jgfaughnan to tag my work.

See also my next post, on snippets.

del.icio.us - very fashionable - collaborative bookmarks

del.icio.us

Collaborative bookmarks with an emergent ontology. Very fashionable. I signed up of course.