MacTips

There comes a time when the old passes away, often to the premature glee of the young, and the next era begins. The writing was on the wall with Apple’s iPhoneification in Lion, and, as usual, Microsoft copies it with the SmartPhonification of Window’s 8. (Gawd, I wish Microsoft could think for itself!)

We old timers, (I’ve been around the Apple computer since 1978) knew this day would come, and here it is… computers are now “appliances” – more like toasters than tools for most of the population.

Most folks just want to surf the web; watch video; chat and maybe put a cute balloon of text on some of their photos. Billions of snapshots are shared with friends daily. Junk mail crams inboxes. Thieves lurk; con-artists abound. Rumor and lies mix with “personalized facts”; the sane and intelligent bemoan the silly bleatings of the herds of sheep.

Some few folk really are artists; most are pretenders to the title – The Thomas Kinkade’s of the world, selling “genuine faux pearls” to the masses.  Some folks really are rich, but the email you got promising you $15,000,000 if you will just send along your bank account and social security number, isn’t gonna work out for you.

Today, most never use the computer as a tool, but more like a fancy television. And the less control they have; the more like an appliance it becomes, the more the huge companies can control what the appliance does; what it serves up; how you get it; and most importantly, how much you pay, pay, and continue to pay for the convenience of not thinking too hard.

The tool that once empowered us, now enslaves the new generation. They accept it, dismissing comments such as this one, with “old fuddy-duddy” and “who cares?”

That may, of course, be entirely true. I remember some of that in me, with my parents. And like them, I’ll be dead soon enough anyway, so really: who cares?

I do. It’s a lament for love lost. For a while there, in the middle of the 20th century, we were climbing higher; getting smarter; showing more compassion; being more aware.

I guess the air got too thin. Something changed, and despite (or because of) the continuing forward drive of technology, the social slide has turned downhill.

I lament the loss of fine music; the failure to read the masters; the lack of appreciation art, and the soaring of the soul these provide.

And, old fuddy-duddy that I am, I resent the homogenizing of my past; the blandness of the future. I resent the loss of my tools as the operating systems of my desktop are dumbed down to the simplicities of my cell phone.

Life goes on. I’m just sorry that I see the future so clearly now, and that there’s no way to explain your losses to you. After all, I’m just some old fuddy-duddy.

The software is fine, BUT… don’t ever change hard drives; don’t ever have a hard drive go out on you. Don’t use a different ethernet card. Don’t add RAM. Don’t ever replace a motherboard, or buy a new graphics card…. because if you do, you’ll lose your license to use the software, and your only option will be to buy it again.

Think I’m exaggerating? Check it out (direct quote from MS:)

“You receive the [activation] error message if one of the following conditions is true:
(snip)You made significant changes to your computer’s hardware, such as installing a new RAM card, a video card, or other hardware [or] you reformatted the hard disk.”

Read the whole thing here: <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2390723>

Since at least one of those things happening is virtually inevitable, you’re really paying Microsoft a rental fee, not even a license. Pay for it, and use it as long as you can… but be prepared to lose every dime you paid… even the next day if your machine changes. (Yes: I made the mistake of buying a larger hard drive for $70…which really cost $220, since Office refuses to run now.)

That’s it. I’m done with Micro$oft. If they want to treat me like a thief, I’ll deal with companies that treat me like a customer, instead.

I find “authorized” software, as a means of copy protection, extremely annoying. As a programmer, I’m forever mucking around with my drives, and software such as Adobe (almost Everything, but Photoshop annoys me the most) and NIK and MS Office et al, all require that you “deactivate/deauthorize” from one drive before you move the software to another.

Let’s leave aside the non-trivial issue of what happens if your drive goes south, and you don’t even have the opportunity to perform a polite deactivation… grrrrr…

Here’s how I do it, when I’m switching out an old drive for a new one, and I can deactivate:

NOTE:  I take NO responsibility for you trying this. It works for me, but if it doesn’t work for you, that’s sorta too bad, eh? Not my fault: I’m just CMA here. You are on your own.

That said, what I do is this:

1) take SuperDuper and clone the old drive to the new drive.

2) do NOT NOT NOT run anything on that new drive yet.

3) NOW go back to your OLD drive (the one you cloned FROM) and deactivate all the software you have that needs it. In the case of Adobe, do the heavy-duty deactivate,  NOT “suspend”.

4) That’s it. Now when you run your new drive, everything will “just work.” You do NOT need to activate each product. If you think about this a bit, it will make sense. Works perfectly for me.

BUT BE SURE that you do NOT try to run the software on the new drive UNTIL you have deactivated the software on the old drive AFTER the clone. If you forget, and try to run Photoshop without FIRST deactivating on the old drive, you’ll spend glorious hours in telephone hell explaining what you did to an overworked Adobe employee.

Folks who are concerned about email retention (as I am) might find this interesting:

http://www.mothsoftware.com/

Like MailSteward (MS), <http://mailsteward.com/> this software archives emails to an external database.

MailSteward does it automatically, at a scheduled interval you can set (or you can invoke it manually). All mail goes into either its own internal SQLite database, or into your machine’s larger mySQL database. It works with Apple’s Mail only.

Mothsoftware’s Mail Archiver X (MAX) does not (yet – it’s planned) support scheduled backups, requiring that you do it yourself, although the process, once setup is trivial.

The advantages however are significant, at least to me:

• Archives emails from the following formats: Entourage, Eudora, Mail, Outlook, Postbox, Powermail, Thunderbird, and standard mbox.

• Exports emails to the following formats: Valentina (native), Filemaker, PDF, mbox, mySQL, Text, or XML.

MAX has a built-in browser for its own Valentina DB and comes with a free browser for FileMaker. (PDF, mBox, mySQL et al all have easily obtainable and free browsers.)

That internal browser for Valentina makes sticking with the MAX Valentina DB the most convenient solution.

I only just got MAX and so don’t have lots of experience with it. I did verify that it performs as advertised above however.

I’ve been using MS, and it’s been 100% reliable and very useful when I need to find an old email, but when you hit 60,000 emails or so, you’ll start reaching the limits of SQLite, and have to pony up for the “real database” version of MS, which uses mySQL and costs $100 ($50 upgrade fee, I think.) (MS prices are $25, $50 and $100.)

Either one, MAX or MS,  will allow you to keep the mail client’s own database small (because once you’ve archived email, you can delete it from the mail program), and the email program will therefore be more responsive, and less trouble to navigate.

Either one will export the database, so you can easily back it up (although restoring mySQL is a bit of a pain.)

The other advantage to MAX over MS is the price: it’s only $35.

Once the developer gets scheduling going, it seems that it’s going to be hard to justify MS much longer… but I’ll have to play with MAX for a while to be sure about that.

As it now stands, the MAX advantages are significant enough for me to seriously consider it… if for no other reason than that it will let me play with other email clients with impunity.

Bottom line between the two: MS is geeky and not “Mac-like” while MAX does a better job of being more friendly, and versatile.

LATER… HOWEVER… MAX is very slow at finding information if the original source is buried in levels of folders. For example, while MS can find almost anything in under a second, MAX takes 12x as long – on my modest 24,000 messages, it takes 12 seconds to return a list of finds.

and so… I went back to Mail Steward.

hth

Tracy

Here’s something you’ll find interesting.

While Mac’s don’t support USB 3 yet, USB 3 is backwards compatible with USB 2, which your Mac has.

So?

Well, USB 3 used in under USB 2 conditions (which I’ll call USB 3/2 to save typing) is much faster than USB 2.

For example, the ADATA S102/16GB USB 3 memory stick is about 50% faster than even the fastest USB 2 stick I’ve found.

And for more of a surprise, how about this:  the $19 Transcend USB 3 card reader (TS-RDF8K) is nearly twice as fast as my fastest USB 2 card reader (500MB copied in 11 sec vs 20 sec.)

So, if you’re into moving data from your camera faster, get a USB3 card reader even if your computer doesn’t support USB 3 yet.

As usual, however, YMMV.

Think of it this way: blocks are “containers for data”.  Or, let’s pretend they are dominos, and the “data” are the dots painted on each one.

line up 20 dominos. See the little dots on the tops of them?

I bought my first Apple in 1978; sat down with Woz’s Red Book (which I still have) and taught myself programming. In December of that year, I was awakened by a woman, unidentified, who has seen my advertisement for “Apple programming.” She asked what I thought of Apple’s own accounting software. I replied that I was not in competition with Apple, and that I frequently recommended their software. Still anonymous, she asked nothing else; simply said “Thank you” and hung up.

Got a new SSD, or a Raptor? Need to squish down that boot drive so it will fit?

Most likely your User (Home) folder is the single largest item on your drive. For example, of my 520 GB of files, 205 GB of it was my home folder. Moving that to a different drive (and a few more files moved & replaced using symbolic links) got my boot drive down to 160 GB.

Sounds scary, and it is… scary, that is. It’s not particularly difficult: really just two steps.

Requirement for what follows: Snow Leopard and SuperDuper.*

OK: three, if you take mandatory step one – MAKE A CLONE FIRST!!! (In fact, you might want to run DiskWarrior just to make sure everything on your drive is ship-shape. Up to you…) Make absolutely certain you’ve used SuperDuper to make a bootable clone BEFORE you go mucking about with your boot drive.

And, just because some fool will call me on it: I am, in no way, shape or form, even -remotely- responsible for you following these instructions and completely trashing a lifetime of work. You’re on your own here buck-o. If you agree to that, and you’ve made a clone, then here we go:

A quick overview:

1) Run SuperDuper and choose the script that will copy your home folder.  (See below for the specific steps to choose a script, or RTM.)

2) in your System Preferences/Accounts, select the account you’re moving, and control click on it. In Advanced Options, choose the newly copied user folder, and accept the changes. (There is a convenient “choose” button.) You’ll be forced to reboot.

DO NOT delete your previous Home folder yet!!!

Basically, that’s it. Perhaps an item or two will complain about the new location, but that’s probably all. (I had to point DropBox again.)

Now, IF you reboot and  things are obviously, seriously wrong, just return to step 2, and change advanced options back to your original home folder. (See why you shouldn’t delete it right away now?) If worse comes to worst, you can replace the boot drive with the clone you made, as instructed above.

And if it’s a total disaster, don’t say I didn’t warn you!  (That’s just CYA on my part… everything was simple and easy to do for me, and I don’t expect it will be any different for you, either.)

Good luck!

*SuperDuper. Why? Because it works, and many Mac users have it. If you don’t, you’ll have to choose some other way of copying the user folder. (Drag and drop is likely to fail, BTW – you need something that will copy properly for the OS.) No, I don’t have other recommendations. This is a quick and dirty guide, explaining what worked for me. YMMV. GIYF.

Here are the specific steps to move your user folder using SuperDuper:

1. new copy script
2. included scripts
3. + button
4. standard scripts
5. backup – user files.dset
6. close
7. save
8. save as “Home folder”
9. —now on the main SD screen, select the source drive and the destination drive
10. in “using” click on “Home folder” under custom scripts
11. Begin the copy.
12. when done, see step 2), above.

What if you want to UN-do all that work? Move back to a single drive (perhaps larger) with your user folder on it, as gawd intended?

Clone your current boot drive to the new (larger) destination drive.

then run SD again, but this time make the source the drive with your user folder on it. But before you hit the go button, make sure you hit the options button, and under “during copy” choose “copy different files.”  This choice will leave your clone in place and copy all the stuff that isn’t present on the destination.

Remember to KEEP your old home folder until you boot after the switch back, and then switch the OS back to the new one, as in (the first) step 2, above. Once you’ve told the OS, using system prefs, that your home folder is back in place, and rebooted to be sure everything is working, you’re free to delete the old user folder that was on its own drive.

I’m a huge fan of SuperDuper! and I’ve used it for years. “Fan” because it’s saved my bacon several times. When a drive dies, I just remove it and use the SuperDuper “clone” and I’m up and running in under 5 minutes.

That said, it’s a “file-level” clone, fully bootable of course, but it’s not an absolutely identical clone, block-for-block.

To do that, you need to do a “block-level” clone. Such a clone ignores the contents of a drive and simply duplicates every low-level block from one drive to the other. You could have one file on the drive or a 15 million; makes no difference – it will take the same amount of time to clone the drive either way.

Carbon Copy Cloner does this, as does DriveGenius and a few others. My personal choice is CopyCatX, since it adds the feature of not requiring the drives to be exactly the same size. (Think about it: if you’re copying all the blocks on one drive, to another drive, that destination drive had better have _exactly_ the same number of blocks as the source, or things are going to get wonky.)

(I believe that if the drives are the exact same size, Disk Utility’s “restore” will also do a block level copy.)

CopyCatX will do a block level clone to a larger destination drive, and then apply the proper resize information to the boot block so that the drive is seen at full size, and not the size of the source.

One quick word here. You’ll often see blanket statements on the internet that “block-level copies are faster than file copies.”

Nonsense. Take a simple example: if you’re copying a 750 GB drive, it will take about 4.5 hours to copy all the blocks. If the source drive has one file on it, a file-level copy will take a few seconds, so the blanket statement that “block-level copies are faster” simply doesn’t hold water. The theory is that the OS has to read the file system and write directories and etc on a file-by-file basis, and that will slow it down. Yeah… but.. these days that adds millionth’s of a second per file. Look: if it takes 4.5 hours to block-level copy a given drive, it will always take 4.5 hours. Period.

The only time a block-level copy will be faster than a file level copy is when the source drive is nearly full… and that refers only to when the destination drive is empty.

If you’re doing a file-level copy using SuperDuper, and the destination already has most of the files from the source (as it would if you’re using SD for backups) then the update of the destination is going to take minutes, not hours.

So: why would you want to do a block-level copy?

1) because it will preserve the exact state of the drive. If you have a drive disaster, the first thing to do is a block-level copy of the damaged drive. Then do your repair attempts on one of them, leaving the other alone. If your repairs only make the situation worse; clone again, and try again.

2) because it will preserve authorizations on that annoying software that uses “activations” and similar approaches. I do this with my daily backup drives. That is: I first do a block-level clone to the destination drive… and from then on, I use SuperDuper to do file-level copies for daily backups. Having done the block-level first insures that the activations are properly copied, and file-level copies won’t alter them.

Finally this tip: why don’t I use Carbon Copy Cloner instead of SuperDuper? Because SuperDuper is nearly twice as fast for file-level clones.