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<title>macosxhints.com storage device tips</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/index.php?topic=hwstorage</link>
<description>Tips and tricks for using storage devices with OS X, from macosxhints.com</description>
<managingEditor>webteam@macosxhints.com</managingEditor>
<webMaster>webteam@macosxhints.com</webMaster>
<copyright>Copyright 2014 Mac OS X Hints</copyright>
<generator>Geeklog</generator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:50:10 -0800</pubDate>
<language>en-gb</language>
<atom:link href="http://hints.macworld.com/backend/hintshwstorage.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<item>
<title>Create a Fusion Drive with a Recovery Partition</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2014030311173257</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2014030311173257</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 Apr 2014 07:00:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2014030311173257#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>There are many step-by-step guides on the internet that explain how to add an SSD to an existing Mac, and create a 'Fusion Drive' that has the speed of an SSD, but also the capacity of a Hard Drive. All these guides fall short in one way that was important to me.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Creating the Fusion Drive the way these walkthroughs say (including OWC's exceptional guides), destroys the Recovery Partition that exists on the drive. Without a Recovery Partition, you cannot enable FileVault2, and will need some other external boot drive if you ever need to perform maintenance on your internal drives. For a laptop computer that might be far from home, not having a Recovery Partition was unacceptable to me. Also note that if you buy a Mac from Apple today with Fusion Drive, it DOES come with a Recovery Partition, so it is indeed possible to do.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;It turns out that Apple's Core Storage technology is more flexible than these walkthroughs give on. You can enroll an individual partition of a  ...</description>
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<item>
<title>Mount and unmount external drives easily via AppleScript </title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120211184732735</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120211184732735</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120211184732735#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>I like to eject my external drives because they slow down my mac when they spin up, but I want to have an easy way to access them if I need to. I wrote a little AppleScript that will toggle the mount status of the drive (if it's mounted, it will eject, if it's unmounted, it will mount).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;To run the script, use the script menu at the right of the menu bar, or bind it to a hot key using a Quicksilver-type app. Be sure to change 'YourDiskNameHere' to the name of the volume you're working with.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The script can be easily adapted to only eject, or only mount the drive. You can also tweak it to display a Mount/Unmount dialog if you wish.&lt;div style=&quot;margin-left: 20px; margin-top:10px; margin-bottom:10px; padding: 5px; border:1px solid; width:520px; height:120px; overflow:scroll;white-space:nowrap;resize:both&quot;&gt;&lt;pre&gt;set diskName to &quot;YourDiskNameHere&quot;tell application &quot;Finder&quot; if disk diskName exists then  eject disk diskName else  tell current application   set deviceL ...&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Easy way to 'trim' an SSD</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120114214648388</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120114214648388</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120114214648388#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>It looks like a simple Disk Repair will trim an SSD.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;I got a new SSD and so I booted from a tertiary drive to clone my old SSD onto my new SSD. After the clone I ran Repair Disk and noticed at the end of the repair it &quot;trimmed&quot; my SSD. Maybe I just missed this before, but I don't recall seeing this trim line in repair disk before.&lt;div style=&quot;margin-left: 20px; margin-top:10px; margin-bottom:10px; padding: 5px; border:1px solid; width:520px; height:120px; overflow:scroll;white-space:nowrap;resize:both&quot;&gt;&lt;pre&gt;Verify and Repair volume &quot;newsystem&quot;Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.Checking extents overflow file.Checking catalog file.Checking multi-linked files.Checking catalog hierarchy.Checking extended attributes file.Checking volume bitmap.Checking volume information.Trimming unused blocks.The volume newsystem appears to be OK.Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/div&gt;So, to force a trim just boot from anoth ...</description>
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<item>
<title>Apparent fix for SD cards repeatedly unmounting, remounting</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011101115490144</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011101115490144</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011101115490144#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>I had a problem with my MacBook Pro repeatedly unmounting and remounting SD cards.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Fixing permissions and restarting didn't help.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Rebooting once into Safe Mode (shut down, power up and press and hold Shift after the chime) fixed it.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Just in case anyone out there runs into the same problem, they can find the solution here. I couldn't find anything on the Internet that referred to this issue.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;[&lt;b&gt;crarko adds:&lt;/b&gt; This would likely indicate that there was some incompatible driver cached. Booting in Safe Mode probably forced the cache to be rebuilt, eliminating the conflict. I've seen this kind of thing with drivers before, but not for a long time, maybe in Tiger.]
</description>
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<title>Checking Very Large Time Machine Volumes</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110829063745320</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110829063745320</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 06 Sep 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110829063745320#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>Checking very large disk volumes with Disk Utility, especially Time Machine backup disks, can be painfully slow, taking many hours to complete, if it completes at all. This Terminal script vastly speeds up checking big volumes.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The tool behind Disk Utility's volume checking is &lt;em&gt;fsck_hfs&lt;/em&gt;, which can also be run from the command line. The key to fast volume checking is a sufficiently large cache for the volume structures in memory, which Disk Utility obviously doesn't supply. This example uses 2.2 GB cache in RAM:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;tt&gt;sudo fsck_hfs -f -c 2200m /dev/disk2&lt;/tt&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;For a full 1TB Time Machine backup disk with many millions of files, this completes in about 10 minutes. A nice side effect is that this also puts less stress on the disk, as most reads are served from the cache.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Adding the little shell script below to your command line tools can make your life a lot easier. It takes the volume name as the single argument. The drive is unmounted during  ...</description>
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<item>
<title>Re-using your Macbook Air 10.6 recovery USB drive</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011080910431045</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011080910431045</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011080910431045#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>With the arrival of Lion, you might be stuck with a recovery USB drive that came with your Snow Leopard pre-installed Macbook Air. Seeing as these are slick little gadgets, it might be nice to use them for other purposes. After all, it's an 8 Gb flash drive just sitting there. Here's how.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Firstly one needs to remove the lock used by Apple. To do this, download sm32xtest (no need to look, Google has already found it) and open in Windows, for example through Boot Camp or on another PC. When you plug in the flash drive it will appear in the first line of the program. Hit 'start' and wait for the program to flash a big green OK.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Now you're ready to use Disk Utility. In Disk Utility, you'll see the flash drive mounted as 8.02Gb, so erase it and re-partition to your liking.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Thanks to many other posters on other fora; I found this, I didn't invent it.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;[&lt;b&gt;crarko adds:&lt;/b&gt; Try this at your own risk, although I suppose there isn't much to lose by it. Exer ...</description>
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<title>Maintaining a Dynamic DNS automatically.</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110812232611102</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110812232611102</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110812232611102#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>Dynamic DNS services provide you with a domain name you can use with a non-static IP address, like most home computers have. To use these requires some action to periodically contact the DNS server and let it know if your Dynamic IP address changed. Usually there are complicated scripts provided to do this, and MacOSXHints has published a few. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;However one can greatly simplify this with a launchDaemon and a single built in OSX unix command.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;First, this assumes that you have set up an account with a Dynamic DNS service. I use the free service provided by &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedns.afraid.org&quot;&gt;FreeDNS&lt;/a&gt;. One updates this simply by loading a web page URL. The act of making that page request alerts the DynamicDNS of your IP address and it updates.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Thus all we need is a LaunchDaemon that runs every hour that reloads that page. Here is an example: ...</description>
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<title>Miniguide to fixing Volume-Filesystem errors</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110216112523818</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110216112523818</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110216112523818#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>There are many drive/filesystem errors that can occur on a Mac. Here are some common symptoms that are indicative of some of them:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Not able to boot the system: You tried to boot. Apple logo appeared, and wheel spun for about 15-20 seconds, then machine turned off. This repeated every time you tried to boot the system. (REASON: The system does not find your HD and thus the OS to boot).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Everything seems to work fine till your system hangs briefly and in an unpredictable way. You wait for a while, and the system magically comes back to normal. But after another while, the same thing re-occurs! (This cycle repeats in the current session).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;You can do these simple things to check for other possible causes:&lt;ul&gt;  &lt;li&gt;Run Activity Monitor to see that this is NOT due to temporarily high CPU and/or Memory usage. &lt;/li&gt;  &lt;li&gt;Check the system log using Console.app or running &lt;tt&gt;tail -f /var/log/system.log&lt;/tt&gt; in Terminal. If your system is having some I/O error th ...&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;</description>
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<title>Make a dual-partitioned HFS+/FAT32 drive play nice with Windows</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110422113851848</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110422113851848</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 28 Apr 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110422113851848#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>This may be evident to some people, but I was a little surprised that my first attempt at it failed.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;If you ever want to divide a drive into two partitions, one formatted as Mac OS Extended (HFS+) and the other as FAT32, and to be able to access the FAT32 partition from Mac OS X and Windows, just make sure you set the FAT32 partition as the first one on the drive when you partition it with Disk Utility.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;To be able to use it under Windows, you also have to make sure the partitioning scheme is set to Master Boot Record (MBR). &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;If you set the HFS+ partition as the first one, Windows won't be able to see the FAT32 partition and will tell you that the disk has to be formatted.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; I tested this with a USB flash drive under Windows 7 Pro and under XP Pro, and both only recognized the FAT32 volume when it was the first one.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;I did not test this with a hard drive, with a different bus than USB, or under Windows Vista, but I assume these cases follow ...</description>
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<title>Fix SSD slow boot times</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110406143838580</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110406143838580</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 Apr 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110406143838580#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>If you've just upgraded from a disk drive to a solid-state disk, booting from reset should take about 15 seconds, logging in should take about 5 seconds, and applications should launch about three to five times faster. However, you may find that everything is faster except the boot from reset, with the initial Apple logo not appearing for about 30 seconds.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The fix is to go into System Preferences &amp;raquo; Startup Disk and select your new solid-state drive. This prevents a 30-second timeout before the boot starts.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Upgrading to a SSD is easy, if a bit expensive. I'd suggest turning your brand-new SSD into a temporary external USB drive using a Universal HDD USB Adapter from Apricorn or NewerTech and format it as HFS Extended Journaled, 1 partition, with Disk Utility. You can then clone your hard drive to it with Carbon Copy Cloner, making sure you are logged in as a administrative user who does *not* have FileVault enabled. Then open up the Mac (using instructions fr ...</description>
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<title>Extra photo and video storage for iPad</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110314054357575</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110314054357575</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Mar 2011 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110314054357575#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>This hint requires the Apple Camera Connection Kit and some SD cards.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;You may find it useful for all sorts of reasons to have extra storage space available on your iPad. In my case as a regular traveller I like to take a number of movies to watch on my iPad but there is a limit to how many large-sized films that can be stored on the device; especially if you have one of the smaller memory sized ones. I know apps like AirVideo can stream from your home computer even when travelling away from home, but this is not always practical depending on where you go.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;I have discovered, after reading a hard-to-find hint elsewhere on the web, that photos and videos can be stored on an SD card, and imported with the SD card adapter in the Camera Connection Kit, as long as the filenames are in a recognised format. The original hint I found suggested that just naming the files correctly would work but I found that the files need to be in a specific folder to be recognised.&lt;br&gt; ...</description>
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<title>How to share TrueCrypted drive for OSX and Linux with write perms</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110110060024871</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110110060024871</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2011 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110110060024871#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>Let's say you have hard drive encrypted with TrueCrypt with HFS+ filesystem on it and you want to use it under both: OSX and Linux. That's no problem because TrueCrypt works great on both systems. But when you want to WRITE to such drive under Linux you'll get an error. That's because Linux do not support writing to journaled HFS. This is how to remove journaling from such drive.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Disabling journalingu on Mac is simple:&lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;connect encrypted hard drive (e.g. TC-Disk) with TrueCrypt and then&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;open Terminal and type:&lt;br&gt; &lt;tt&gt;diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/TC-Disk&lt;/tt&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;Disabling journaling on Linux is slightly more complicated. Open up a shell window and do the following (comments are in parentheses, the # is the prompt):&lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;tt&gt;# truecrypt --filesystem=none /dev/sda&lt;/tt&gt; (TrueCrypt connects drive without knowledge of filesystem type.)&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;tt&gt;# truecrypt -l&lt;/tt&gt; (Look for the mount path of the drive.)&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;You should see someth ...&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;</description>
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<title>Use GParted LiveCD to recover missing partition</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101230230446987</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101230230446987</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Jan 2011 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101230230446987#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>My Macintosh HD startup disk disappeared today, but I was able to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://gparted.sourceforge.net/&quot;&gt;GParted&lt;/a&gt; to delete a small partition from the drive and the missing disk reappeared. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Boot Camp Assistant got me into this hot water when I was preparing to reinstall XP. I had partitioned my harddrive into one 276 GB Mac partition and one 5 GB Windows partition, but decided to delete the Windows partition and start over. This time I used BCA and set the size of the new partition to 16 GB.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;When running the XP installer, I noticed I was only shown a single 'C:' partition as an option for the install location. The first time I installed XP, I remember seeing two partitions listed with 'Unpartitioned space' between them in the list. Something didn't seem right, so I exited the installer and rebooted, holding the option key for the boot menu.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;I was shocked to discover that my 'Macintosh HD' startup disk was gone... only a 'Windows' disk was availa ...</description>
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<title>Prevent SSD wear by using a RAM disk for cache</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011010204203424</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011010204203424</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 04 Jan 2011 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011010204203424#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>Installing a new OCZ Vertex II SSD in an old 2006 iMac really speeds things up (and is documented in photos &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flickr.com/photos/quicksander/sets/72157625505156837/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;However, I was searching for ways to limit the wear of my SSD (since each cell has a limited lifetime with regards to writes). One solution was to store the Safari cache on a RAM drive which will only be written to disk at logout.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Several hints on this site describe a way to store Safari cache on a RAM drive. However, none seemed to work for me because:&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Some RAMdrive creators were not available for download anymore (EsperanceDV).&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Other scripts did not provide a way to store the cache to disk at logout.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;
Therefore, I created &lt;a href=&quot;http://skywarp.s3.amazonaws.com/public/Cache2RAM.app.zip&quot;&gt;this Mac OSX application&lt;/a&gt; (which is actually a simple Bash script), which you can place in your login items which will create a RAM drive and store/restore  ...</description>
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<title>Transfer a Time Machine volume to a larger disk</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101215163223723</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101215163223723</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Dec 2010 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101215163223723#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>Transferring a Time Machine backup to a larger disk can be challenging, as a simple file copy operation in the Finder does not work.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The entire volume has to be transferred in one piece, sector by sector. Disk Utility can usually do this by creating an interim image, but that requires an even larger disk as a temporary storage medium.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;This hint is a bit more low level, but once understood, pretty simple: Copy all volume blocks to the new drive, then adjust the volume's size to match the new, larger, partition. That's it.
In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tempel.org/TransferTimeMachineVolumeToLargerDisk&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; I describe how I moved my entire Time Machine backup from one internal disk to another, larger, one. This technique keeps the backup volume intact so that TM keeps using it without the need to start over by losing all previous backups. In my case, I had the volume on a mirrored RAID set, and move it to another, larger, mirrored RAID set - so this works, too. ...</description>
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<title>Offsite daily encrypted backup via Dropbox</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101122081425940</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101122081425940</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2010 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101122081425940#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>Using some shell scripting + crontab + Dropbox, I've created a method for doing a daily encrypted backup of folders, lasting for 31 days.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Why bother? It's important to back up data because eventually all drives will die. Incremental backups are important because it allows you to track changes from day to day. The solution I have here isn't perfect, but it allows for a few folders to be saved for 30 days before they are overwritten. The benefit of this is that if a huge error is caught 5 days after it was made, then you can revert to the file that was saved 6 days ago.
Following is the script that does the job. I named this file backup.sh and had it run every day at 3am, when nobody is likely to be editing or messing with files. The result of the code is a disk image (.dmg) that will be password protected, and will have the name of backup[1-31].dmg (based on the current date). You'll need to edit the first few variable to match your setup. ...</description>
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<title>RAID volumes not appearing in Disk Utility</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010110903253554</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010110903253554</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Nov 2010 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010110903253554#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>I recently had a disk problem where RAID Utility said the disks and volumes were all fine but the volumes were simply absent in Disk Utility. I was at a total loss for what to do, since the system didn't even see any volumes to boot from unless I booted from the install disk, in which case the installer couldn't see any volumes to install on (although it would let me run Disk Utility and RAID Utility). Searching on the web, many people seem to have had a problem like this, but nobody ever came back to report if or how they fixed it.
RAID Utility's apparent total satisfaction with the situation rules out almost any hardware problem -- no need to see if the RAID card somehow got dislodged or anything like that. Even verifying the RAID set (which takes time measured in days -- don't bother) didn't indicate any problems.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;In my case, there was a subtle clue from RAID Utility that something was amiss: Each volume was listed as having zero partitions. [&lt;b&gt;crarko adds:&lt;/b&gt; I woul ...</description>
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<title>How to fix a Time Machine hangup</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101105025816745</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101105025816745</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 08 Nov 2010 07:30:00 -0800</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101105025816745#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>Time Machine, while it does have a very usable interface, is inclined to get stuck sometimes. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Occasionally Time Machine seems to be stuck, but isn't really. When you first do a backup, or when you haven't backed up to a particular disk for ages (perhaps if you have been away on a trip), it can spend several hours 'preparing'. You can tell it is preparing because when you open the Time Machine preferences there is the little barber pole saying 'Preparing.'&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The essence of the solution is to open up the backup media and find the file ending in '.inProgress' and then deleting that file. This will be on the backup volume inside the &lt;em&gt;Backups.backupdb&lt;/em&gt; folder, and then in the subfolder for the machine and volume which was being backed up at the time of the hangup. These folders may be inside of a Sparse Disk Image if the backup goes to a Time Capsule or other network based backup volume. After rebooting the Mac Time Machine can then startup normally and perform i ...</description>
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<title>Disk Utility may not warn of a failing hard drive</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100928143902257</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100928143902257</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100928143902257#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>While Apple's bundled Disk Utility application reports a hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. status, the information might not be correct.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;If you care about the information stored on a hard drive that is connected to an internal bus of your Mac, you should consider using other applications than Apple's Disk Utility to monitor that drive's health.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;As can be seen in the following screen shot an HDD riddled with bad blocks is still reported as having it's S.M.A.R.T. status verified.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flickr.com/photos/adriannier/5034447480&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; a screenshot showing the difference between Disk Utility and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php&quot;&gt;SMART Utility&lt;/a&gt; at displaying the S.M.A.R.T. parameters.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;[&lt;b&gt;crarko adds:&lt;/b&gt; S.M.A.R.T. in general has not been incredibly successful at forecasting drive failure. &lt;a href=&quot;http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf&quot;&gt;H ...&lt;/a&gt;</description>
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<title>Prevent disk auto-mount while logged in</title>
<link>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100727040927706</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100727040927706</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:30:00 -0700</pubDate>
<comments>http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100727040927706#comments</comments>
<dc:subject>Storage Devices</dc:subject>
<description>While there are numerous well-documented ways to prevent a hard disk or USB drive from mounting at boot-time, I found only one way (working in 10.6) to prevent newly-connected disks from auto-mounting while logged in.
It is possible to turn off the responsible process:&lt;div style=&quot;margin-left: 20px; margin-top:10px; margin-bottom:10px; padding: 5px; border:1px solid; width:520px; height:60px; overflow:scroll;white-space:nowrap;resize:both&quot;&gt;&lt;pre&gt;sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/div&gt;This has negative repercussions on general ejecting and mounting. Turning &lt;em&gt;diskarbitrationd&lt;/em&gt; back on with &lt;tt&gt;load&lt;/tt&gt; instead of &lt;tt&gt;unload&lt;/tt&gt; doesn't solve all problems, either.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;So I looked far and wide for a simple GUI tool performing this function; all I found were expensive forensics-toolkits for law enforcement which offer this function on the side.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Then I stumbled upon this gem:  ...</description>
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