Tiger - moving mail from an 10.3 Mail.app

Apple - Mac OS X

There are several ways to move Mail.app data into Tiger when switching machines. You can use Apple's data migration utility, but I prefer to move more gradually. (Mail.app data structures changed in Tiger to fit Spotlight.)

I logged in on my Tiger account and copied all my ~/Library/Mail files to the new machine. Then I tried two approaches. The second is better:

1. Fire up Mail.app. Create a new account. Import old content using the built-in import function. This brings in only mailbox data.

2. Delete everything in ~/Library/Mail on the new machine (eg. data from #1). Copy the Mail files from old machine in here. Start Mail.app. It imports mail and configuration data.


At first I created a new mailbox and used the Mail.app import function to imp

SuperDuper: clones and creates bootable startup disk -- even in 10.4.2

SuperDuper

A very sophisticated approach to recovering data from a dead drive: using a linux utility with OS X Tiger

macosxhints - 10.4: Recover a dead hard drive using GNU ddrescue

macosxhints - Move an iTunes library to a new machine

macosxhints - Move an iTunes library to a new machine

Read the whole thread, there's more than approach. I've noted this before I think, but it's newly relevant to me.

Good advice on cleaning up after a crash and a force quit

Apple - Discussions - G3 - after the crash

Apple forum advice for recovering from an 'out of drive space' crash:

... it might be that a force quit left behind some huge cache files, making things worse.

If that's the case, you might locate them by asking File>Find to search for invisible files whose size is, say, greater than 50MB…

Either way if you're trying to clear a G3-vintage disk, it probably needs at least 10% of its total space free to avoid exactly this kind of situation.

Also for future refernce - though you may have already tried it this time - when you get the kind of trouble warning you got, then if you can actually clear the warning it may not be necessary to do anything else but wait. When you've used up pretty well all of both disk and RAM, files that normally open quite quickly can take minutes extra, giving the impression that nothing's happening and making force quit too tempting…

Sharing an address book via dotMac (.Mac)

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

This could be of interest for our family, it would be quite handy to have a family address book. As the TUAW notes, it would be better if one could share a subset of an address book. Maybe there's a workaround ...

Konfabulator -- free for OS X

Update: It's funny how catastrophe strikes. You're driving down the road one day, and wham -- someone caves in the side of your car. Or you're playing with a neat widget, like Konfabulator, and the system locks up. You hear odd recurrent drive noises. You can't shut down. You realize you have Classic running, and Konfabulator's just installed, and Fast User Switching is enabled and somehow a network share has been loaded and a remote DMG mounted, and you wonder how much free space there is on the iBook drive and you sweat. You try to kill the apps that are running, but finally you power off. And that's it. The drive is toast. Beyond repair by Disk Utility.

Was it Konfabulator? The app of which I'd just written:

My new iMac runs Tiger and Dashboard, but my old Panther iBook can't. So I've downloaded Konfabulator, which is now free courtesy of Yahoo's acquisition. Depending on how it works on my iBook, the Panther/Tiger/Windows features of Konfabulatory may have me installing it on Panther too.

PS. My last Retrospect backup was at 3 am this morning and it appears to have run properly -- for once! I've restored my data to another machine it it seems intact. So now I'll see if Retrospect will manage a 'full disaster restore' to the iBook.

Update: Apple's Hardware test is reporting an error code of the form: ata 1/6/13 HD 2,0.
I take this to mean the drive is toast. So Konfabulator might have been an innocent bystander.