iTunes sync misbehaviors - the drive fails Tech Tools Pro bad block scan. And a new rotation policy.

It took 18 hours of disk scanning with Tech Tools Pro to uncover the hard drive bad blocks that probably contribute to some of my recent iTunes sync errors. Errors that had left me on the verge of paying $200 to repair an iPhone 4s — I’m now going to hold off on the repair until I test that iPhone against a replacement drive.

I bought Disk Tools Pro 3 years ago when my primary iMac drive developed bad blocks, so it’s paid for itself a couple of times over. Once again Disk Utility found no errors and the SMART status was “fine”.

The drive is dead, modern drives are not allowed any bad blocks. The drive's onboard computer remaps bad blocks dynamically, when they show on this kind of test the drive has exhausted its reserve. So I need a replacement.

Lately I’ve been buying Western Digital Green SATA III 5400 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk WD40EZRX drives, a few months ago the sweet spot was 3TB, this time it's 4TB. I don’t worry about performance on this external drive — I use my internal SSD for apps that need speed. I like that these drives run cool.

I also don’t need 4TB of storage — for one thing my backup drives are only 3TB. I assume that a 4TB drive will have a larger set of remappable blocks and that’s helpful.

The 4TB capacity will come in handy when this drive gets rotated out to backup. I’m getting tired of drive failures — mine seem to last 2-3 years at best. So I’m going to start replacing my secondary external drive every 18 months. At that time if it passes a full block scan it will go into the backup pool, and I’ll junk my oldest backup drive.

PS. If iTunes were really having trouble accessing data from this drive, the polite thing would have been to write something useful to Console.app log files.

H2O Mobile and data services: the Profile is not backed up, needs separate restore

A few months ago I discovered that I could enable cellular data on the kid’s iPhones, powered by $40/year H2O wireless [1] …

Gordon's Tech: ptel Real Paygo vs. H2O with data

… H2O now allows data use for iPhones [1]. I believe this is new, I learned of it via chat support as a last step check prior to migrating our daughter to Ptel [2]. The data service requires installing a new carrier profile from an ominous looking and quite mysterious web site: http://www.locusapi.com/pcs/apn.php…

Today I learned that the profile isn’t part of an iOS backup. When I switched my daughter’s iPhone H2O wireless cellular data stopped working.  Reinstalling the profile fixed the problem.

[1] $10 every 3 months covers all the text/voice the boys need. My daughter needs about $80 a year, still very cheap. We enable cellular data for Maps, Messaging, email, calendar and a few other low bandwidth services.

OS X - moving files between users on one machine - how Apple expected this to work (13 years later)

I think my first version of OS X was 10.1 - “Puma” - probably in the fall of 2001, at the dawn of the Forever War. I certainly remember Jaguar.

OS X had roots in BSD Unix, so it was naturally multi-user with UNIX style permissions from the start. The multi-user bit has worked well, the permissions bit not quite so well. Windows style permissions have always been less troublesome than Mac/Unix permissions.

Maybe that’s why it has taken me 13 years to figure out how to share files between users without having to geek-out and explicitly change permissions (which is what I’d always done). Note that I have always kept a single admin user account separate form the accounts I and other family members use and my personal account is non-admin (which partly breaks Google software btw, Google expects Mac users to be admins) [2].

It goes like this:

1. Ted logs into Ted account.
2. Ted creates a folder in /Users/Shared with files for Alice.
3. Alice logs into Alice account.
4. Alice copies folder from /Users/Shared to Alice Desktop.

This is what’s happening to permissions…

1. The folder in Shared, and all files in that folder, are Read & Write for Ted, Read only for everyone else.
2. After the copy operation, the folder and files on Alice’s desktop is Read & Write for Alice, Read only for “everyone” [1].

Note Alice can’t delete the folder in /Shared, only Ted or an Admin can do that. (Since most Mac users run as Admin they don’t know this.)

 

There you go, it’s documented at last. Not that many people will ever need to know! Most Mac geeks run as admin, so they can probably work with the Shared folder directly.  Or, more often, they just use Google Drive or Dropbox to share files [3]. Non-geeks don’t even see the Shared folder — Apple has deprecated its use in Mountain Lion and later; Apple expects file share to be mediated by iCloud rather than a local file system.

- fn -

[1] Except for OS X veterans who have been infected by Apple’s “fetching forever” viral bug. We get someone else called “Fetching” with Read Only access.

[2] This has worked well for me, and I like the extra security layer it provides. It’s also a quick test of cruddy software — if the app won’t run well without admin privileges it’s a shoddy app. Google’s software is the annoying exception - a shoddy bit of Mac software I use anyway.

[3] We are a Google Apps centric family, so we share with Google Drive.

Troubleshooting iTunes misbehavior - move the library

I’ve had an outbreak of iTunes and iOS sync misbehavior lately. I’m not the only one.

While I wait for Apple to fix their bugs [1] I figured I’d try a refresh of my iTunes Library. It’s unlikely to hurt, and I have abundant backups. [2]

It’s a very old trick — so old I’d all but forgotten it. You just move your iTunes Media folder (advanced prefs, organize, etc). I’ve done this a few times over the past 10-12 years and it’s generally worked well. It’s really a copy, not a move, so if everything is fine you can delete your old files [3]. You need a lot of disk space of course, but external drives are cheap these days.

During the move it’s a good idea to turn off backup, especially Time Machine. Otherwise you’ll run into drive churn slowdowns. Just be sure to create a reminder to turn backup on again the next morning. (On my system this takes hours to complete, so I run it overnight.)

I figure if there are any file or database corruption problems this might clear them up. At least it ensures that everything has been touched by the current (icky) version of iTunes and all files have been freshly written to disk.

- fn -

[1] Given all of Apple’s recent software quality problems, I sometimes wonder about industrial sabotage.

[2] I’m at the point where I’m looking for hardware issues. One trick is to switch to WiFi sync — eliminates issues with USB cables, USB hub, USB ports, etc.

[3] I like to rename the original folder and let it sit for a few weeks. I create a reminder to delete it then.

Update 12/6/14

The library move seemed to go as smoothly as ever. Subsequent syncs were quick and trouble free, but only time will tell if anything has truly improved.

One theory on what is so screwed up with iOS 8.1.x and iTunes 12 synchronization

This comment on a thread about the hot mess that is iTunes 12 / iOS 8.1.x sync fits my theory…

Revisiting iTunes/iOS sync issues | The Robservatory: "incomplete syncs due to bad disk sectors in just a couple of songs (apparently when it hit the bad sectors it quit entirely–and silently–rather than moving on to the next song)"

My theory is that there have always been bugs and problems with iTunes sync, but when an error occurred iTunes moved to the next operation. It didn’t quit or hang. It also didn’t log anything useful to Console.

Now iTunes still doesn’t log anything useful to Console, but it doesn’t continue. It just quits the sync operation (might move to next one).

I hate you Apple.

Aperture Tips: Work around for lack of multiple windows - "Recent Items" filter on Library

One of my biggest Aperture frustrations is the inability to open multiple Projects or Album windows and drag and drop files between them. You can drag images from a Project or Album to another, but finding targets amidst hundreds (thousands) of albums and targets is very hard.

The “Favorites” and “Recent Items” filters in Library search can help:

Right click on an Album/Project to make it a Favorite. Anything you touch/view is “Recent”. Between Favorite and Recent filters it’s much easier to navigate between Projects or Albums in a large image repository.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Aperture Tips: Introduction to a series of posts

Bloggers label (category) feeds (and Yahoo Pipes is still around)

I decided today to start writing more about ways to use Apple’s defunct Aperture photo management app. I’ll be using it for years while I wait for Photos.app to mature, and I know it’s not going to change much.

Writing that post I wondered again if Blogger supported feeds on tags (“Labels”). I thought they did; sure enough I wrote about this feature four years ago…

Gordon's Tech: Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes

… To start with, here's the label for "technology"

http://notes.kateva.org/search/label/technology

and here's the feed (Atom) following the above pattern

http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/technology

The only new development in the past four years is that this is now an official feature. Unfortunately the Feeds still don’t get a useful name.

I wrote about Yahoo Pipes in the same blog post; Pipes was the IFTTT of its day (but far more ambitious). Turns out Pipes is still around; things that are useful but abandoned tend to be stable and cheap to maintain (last Twitter post was 7/2013 though — I wouldn’t build a mission critical operation on Pipes).