Tag Archives: Time Machine

2009 – a year in review

Posted by on December 29, 2009 No comments

The last 12 months have been quite interesting for most.

  • 2009 saw the deaths of larger-than-life personalities, among them: King of Pop Michael Jackson, ’70s icon Farah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze (actor in Dirty Dancing and Ghost) , David Carradine (actor in Kung-fu and Kill Bill-series) , Karl Malden (Streets of San Francisco), Les Paul (inventor of the solid-body electric guitar), Wayne Allwine (the voice of Micky Mouse), Larry Gelbart (creator of TV-series M*A*S*H), Bea Arthur (Dorothy in The Golden Girls), John Hughes (writer/director of The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and Brittany Murphy
  • 2009 saw science in the news, among it: The Outbreak of Swine Flu (H1N1), the solar eclipse, the Perseids meteor shower in August, the reborn Conficker worm causing havoc again, $1.1bn repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope as the complete space shuttle fleet (Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour) where placed into orbit, global warming and a spur of tusnamis (such as the one in September in Samoa), Bermuda Triangle (with the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 from Rio),
  • Internet start-ups and market-darlings continued their fame – FaceBook, Twitter, Hulu, Bing, LinkedIn. Remarkably (and unnoticed), Rosetta Stone’s company stock shot up by 40% as unemployed folks are looking to add skills to their CVs and the U.S. government trying to teach soldiers military terms in Arabic and the Amazon Kindle.
  • 2009 also brought sudden fame to people, such as: Susan Boyle (the frumpy spinster becoming famous in Britain’s Most Talented), the “Octomom” Nadya Suleman, Carrie Prejean’s response about gay marriage during the Miss USA pageant and “Balloon Boy” Falcon Heene.
  • The Academy Awards are a triumph for Slumdog Millionaire, which wins eight Oscars,
  • Businessman Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to bilking investors out of $65 billion in a Ponzi scheme
  • The Large Hadron Collider is restarted after a 14-month delay caused by squirrels stealing the particles
  • In sports, roughly 40 percent of the U.S. bimbo population announces that it has at one time or another hiked the Appalachian Trail with Tiger Woods.
  • The International Space Station is taken over by Somali pirates.

On my blog I wrote this year 148 articles which attracted 68,000 unique visitors in the last 12 months (about 7,000 new visitors each month), used 2TB of traffic, received on average 300 unique page-views per day (ranking me in the Top-50 South African websites) and made me an (awesome) USD 120,00 in Google advertising revenue.

Among the most popular articles were:

  1. My CV / job file: This was really the main reason why I started my blog. I wanted to get a high enough ranking on Google to have my CV visible. A Google search for “cv websphere architect” still ranks me as #1. I have launched my CV online 3 years ago and have received 52,600 hits to it (60 views per day; scroll to the bottom of the CV to view). I never had to job-hunt, as I would typically get 5-10 queries per month.
  2. OS X: Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+: How to configure your Synology NAS (or any NAS for that matter) to work with Mac’s OS X TimeMachine. This has been a valuable feature in my life, and saved me plenty of time in restoring from backup.
  3. Marlboro License Department rocks: I posted a personal experience about this in 2008 and I still get a high count of visits. I received so many emails/comments asking me for directions, that I eventually updated the article with GPS-coordinates. Since GPS-coordinates have not been sufficient, I post now also a link to Google Maps.
  4. South African HTC Dream Hacked: This was intended to point more experienced users in the right direction to flash a custom firmware onto the G1 (or HTC Dream). This article alone attracted 2,000 hits within the first 12 hours of posting. Still one of the best phones I owned so far.
  5. Android: Too Many Pattern Attempts. Phone is locked: One of the most helpful articles for me. Android has a cool pattern locking feature, but with all the clowns in the office, my phone was locked in no time. With GPS and WILAN disabled, there is no way to unlock the phone, other than doing a hard-reset and loosing all data. The instructions (for a rooted phone) reset the lock and unlock the phone.
  6. Jailbait: It’s obvious – sex sells.


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Synology: Easy Time Machine integration

Posted by on July 26, 2009 6 comments

The recent release of Synology’s 2.2 beta firmware includes Time Machine support. For all Synology users, my tutorial OS X: Time Machine backup has now really become a piece of cake:

  1. Create a shared folder called “TimeMachine”
  2. Create a user called “TimeMachine” and assign a quota (typically twice as much as your Mac’s HDD
  3. Go to Diskstations Filesharing settings and select the “TimeMachine” shared folder in the drop-down:
  4. Click “OK” and then mount the volume on the Mac and you are done

Remember when you had to create sparsebundles? This is not required anymore, the Time Machine will automatically create this for you. I have archived off my old backup and started a fresh one and sofar testing looks good.

Tip: I have compared the speed when mounting the backup volume via smb:// (Samba) and afp:// (Apple File protocol). While smb runs at about 6-8MB/sec, AFP can push it to 11-12MB/sec (via a wireless link).

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Updated Timemachine guidelines

Posted by on February 11, 2009 1 comment

If you are one of the many users who have followed my guidelines “OS X: Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+“, I strongly urge you to revisit the article.

A number of users reported some issues which require your attention:

  • If your backups are larger than 250 gigabytes, there are issues with regards to the size and the number of bands being used in the sparsebundles. To fix this, you can either convert your current sparsebundle or start a new one. You are not affected if your sparsebundles are smaller.
  • Some people reported issues with mounting the images over AFP. I could verify this as well and found that mounting the images via SMB was more reliable. I am uncertain if this is related to OS X 10.5.6 or the firmware on the DiskStation.

Continue reading “Updated Timemachine guidelines” »

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OS X: Time Machine backup

Posted by on December 10, 2008 No comments

My article OSX Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+ has been really popular over the last few months.

The comments on the posting alone should provide a feel of how well this worked for most of the OSX users. I have received numerous confirmations from happy Mac-users who managed to get their TimeMachine to co-operate with a number of different NAS’s (QNAP, Linksys, Synology) as well as your standard run-of-the-mill Linux servers.

As a one-time special and limited to 2,000 downloads only, I have provided a “super-pretty” version of my instructions as donation-ware:

If you feel that this website and it’s articles have added value to your life, click on the link below and show your token of appreciation and you will be equally rewarded with a 3-page manual on how to get the TimeMachine going. (Well, you can find the same information in the link above – that’s why it’s called donation).

There is also a motive behind this: I will very soon publish *** FOR FREE **** on how you can get your own integration with Paypal going and this is the best way of testing the app and at the same time buy me a beer or two :-)

 

 

 

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OS X: Time Machine backups

Posted by on July 23, 2008 No comments

I have been running Time Machine backups as described in my tutorial for more than a week.

In the Apple forums there have been discussions that the above method does not work. However:

  • Backups via Time Machine to a NAS DO work. It will not work properly if you do not backup inside of a sparsebundle.
  • A bug (which got fixed in OSX 10.5.4) prevented Time Machine not to purge old backups and resize the sparsebundle. This is now working properly and I could confirm it in the OS X console.
  • When a sparsebundle is created with fixed size and a quota is applied on your NAS, Time Machine will purge old backups to make the latest backup fit within the provided quota
  • OS X introduced additional AFP functions 4C (for Spotlight), 4E (directory sync for TimeMachine) and 4F (file sync for TimeMachine) and the NetTalk protocol implemented on any NAS does not support this. The lack of those functions however does not affect your backups.
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OS X: Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+

Posted by on July 15, 2008 67 comments

I finally got the single-bay, 1TB NAS:

It took a few hours to “make” OS X TimeMachine to accept the NAS and perform backups – the steps below will outline what is necessary.

Update 2009-05-14: With 10.5.7 Apple seems to have broken the sparse-band-size, resulting in the current sparsebundle to be unmountable. Apple has reduced the band-sizes of sparse-bundles to 128MB. You can convert your existing sparsebundle via the following command: hdiutil convert -format UDSB -imagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -o new.sparsebundle old.sparsebundle

Update 2009-02-11: I have received a number of reports that large sparse-bundles (in excess of 250 gigabytes) fail to backup properly. User joar on the Synology forum has the explanation for this: “Those sparsebundle images that Time Machine uses work like this: They basically consist of a few files and one folder with all the payload files (called “bands”) in it. If the images are created automatically by Time Machine, the size of each “band” file is set to 8MB. If your backup is > 300GB you can do the math. Remember what I wrote? One folder with all the bands.”

To solve this problem instead of creating 8MB bands we will create 128MB bands (262144 times 512 bytes). You are able to convert your existing sparse-bundles via (change the max-size from 70GB to whatever suits you):
hdiutil convert -format UDSB -tgtimagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -tgtimagekey size=70g -o tempfilename.sparsebundle machinename_macid.sparsebundle

I tried the conversion of the above and it took extremely long – I eventually wiped my old backups and started from fresh. You will notice as part of this exercise that your original sparse-bundle image will be larger (in my case increasing the band-size increased the initial sparsebundle from 80MB to 1.5 gigabytes)

The installation was straight forward, but you should consider a number of steps:
Continue reading “OS X: Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+” »

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