Backups Are Your Friend

If I were to provide one piece of advice to computer users, it would be to always have a backup of your data. I can't speak for Windows, but on Macs anyway, it's super easy and convenient. Just buy and plug in an empty external hard drive and Time Machine will automatically do periodic backups of your data. With Time Machine, it even does hourly backups for the past day (then after a day, it only keeps one a day for the past week and then one a week). It's easy to think that you'll be fine and never need a backup, but you'll never know when something will happen and you'll be extra glad that you have that backup, and happy you spent the money on that extra hard drive.

Like if you accidentally delete every album in your music library that starts with the letter "T". Which just happened to me. And yes, that includes "The" as well. One click in the wrong place and it was gone. All gone. Not just the entries in the iTunes library but the actual audio files on the hard drive themselves, too. That's over 60 albums total.

After a moment of panic and frustration that I could have done something so stupid I remembered my backup and began the restoration process. It was 7:40 and my last backup was at 7:06. I'd lose about half an hour's worth of the library cleanup and updating that I had been doing, but it sure beats the considerable effort of rebuilding that part my library that would have been required had I not had a backup handy. Sure, iTunes now lets you re-download old purchases, but not all my music came from iTunes. A significant amount of it is still from old CDs that I would have had to take the time re-ripping (not to mention digging through the boxes in my closet to find them all first), and a bunch came from other digital music stores that I couldn't re-download them from. Plus, I'd lose all the play counts and last played dates. I really like having statistics like that.

And the really crazy thing is that I recently signed up for iTunes Match so I could have re-downloaded every one of those albums (most of which I was going to re-download anyway, so I could get them in higher quality that way) except that, when I deleted it all, I had also checked off the “Also delete these items from iCloud” box. That wasn't an error, since I had intended to check that. The problem was that instead of having one song selected, somehow the entire playlist got selected.

So, to restore my library there were two places I had to go using Time Machine. First was the Music\iTunes folder under my home directory. There were a number of iTunes Library files there that needed restoring. Fortunately, those were small and restored quickly. But then I needed to restore my audio files. I decided the simplest thing would be to restore the entire Music folder. Sure, it meant 65GB of data and 40 minutes of time, but it was far easier, and probably quicker as well, to restore everything than to go through each individual artist subfolder to see if there were albums missing, and restoring just those albums.

After waiting for everything to get restored, I was very glad to see that the process worked perfectly, and all my "T" albums were back and the handful of tracks I played at random did indeed play. Three cheers for backups! Now tomorrow I had better remember to bring home my “off-site backup” hard drive from work so I can update that one too.

Feeling Hot! Hot! Hot!

Over the summer, I paid closer attention to the temperature inside my apartment. Mainly, because I had the patio door open as much as possible, but made sure to close it before the temperature outside surpassed what it was inside. I have two thermostats—one in the main part of my apartment and one in my bedroom. I soon noticed a curious phenomenon, where after spending more than a few minutes in my bedroom, the temperature there raised by 2-3 degrees.

Very curious. I know that when you pack a whole bunch of people in a room it can get quite warm and stuffy, but I didn't think just my body by itself gave off enough heat to warm a whole room. But that's what appeared to be happening, and only in my bedroom. I figured the rest of my apartment was large enough that the heat I gave off wasn't enough to raise the temperature noticeably there.

Then finally, sometime last week, I came to realise what the real cause of the apparent heat gain was. What was I doing all those times I was in my bedroom? Doing stuff on my computer. Which can give off a fair amount of heat when it's working hard. And is located about half a foot from the thermostat. Mystery solved! And here I thought maybe I was just such a super hot guy. Oh well.

iThink iWant an iPad

Well, it happened. Earlier this week, Apple unveiled the second-generation iPad. When I first watched the presentation of the original iPad a year ago, I thought I'd like to have one, but that the best move for me would be to hold off and wait for the next one. Although I love technology, I'm not always an early adopter when it comes to buying it. Most game consoles I've bought have been purchased a couple years after it was released. And yes, I did get my iPhone only a couple weeks after it was available, but that was technically the second model of the device (although to be fair, I think I would have bought the first one right away had it been made available in Canada. I've never been as blown away by any product presentation as when the iPhone was announced).

Routine is Your Friend!

It has been said, “Routine is your friend.” I am here to say that is completely true. Sticking to one routine in particular would have saved me a lot of headache troubleshooting a computer issue this evening. At one point I was genuinely worried that my Mac was dead and would need to be sent out for repairs. Which would have been very bad luck, since it was only one week ago that my Xbox 360 died and needed to be sent away (it's still within warranty, fortunately!).

Because of another issue I was having, I went to reboot my Mac, and it wouldn't actually reboot. It just hung indefinitely at a solid grey screen, and the same thing happened with all other attempts. Even when I left it and went to the living room to watch something for a bit, I came back to the same grey screen. I'll spare you the tale of my troubleshooting attempts (which would be quite the tale in and of itself), and skip to the end.

I have what is called an hard drive dock. It's sort of like an iPod dock except bigger, and designed for computer internal hard drives. Those of you who work with me may have seen a hard drive on my desk—I use that as an off-site backup. I occasionally take it home, power on the dock, pop in the HD, let Carbon Copy Cloner do its thing, eject the drive from my Mac's desktop, power off the dock, remove the HD, then take it back to work the next morning so it once again meets the “off-site” part of “off-site backup.”

It turns out that the last time I updated it, I missed my “power off the dock” step. You wouldn't think that would be important, but it seems that little thing was the cause of all my problems. After I finally determined that to be the cause, with repeated testing I confirmed that my Mac indeed only boots up fine when this HD dock isn't turned on.

Of course, I have formulated a theory about why this is the case. My hunch is that, as part of the boot process, the Mac firmware enumerates all the attached HDs. And since there was no physical HD plugged into the dock the Mac hung indefinitely trying to read the disc that it thought should be there but actually wasn't. I'm definitely going to have to test this the next time I bring home my HD. If my hunch is correct, having the dock turned on but with an HD in it should allow my Mac to reboot correctly.

But is it a Mac issue? An odd quirk of this HD dock in particular? Or something that can be duplicated using any HD dock on any modern computer? But you know what, at this point I really don't care. As long as I stick to my routine and switch it off when my backup is complete I won't have further problems, and if I do slip up sometime, at least I know what to check right away.

The Insomniac Time Traveler

WARNING: More techy post than usual today. But I guess that definitely makes it count as Something Completely Different, doesn't it?

For the past year or so, I've had an issue with my Mac where it lost the ability to automatically go into sleep mode, in which it uses extremely little power, instead just sitting there idle until I manually put it to sleep. I tried to determine the problem, but eventually I gave up and figured it was an issue where I'd have to reinstall the OS, which I didn't really want to do. When I bought my new iMac, at first it would sleep correctly, then it refused to, just like my old Mac. I worked more intentionally towards solving this issue over the past week, and I eventually narrowed the cause down to my USB hub. If you don't know, it's a small device that turns one port on the computer into several, so you can plug in more devices. If this hub is not plugged in, my iMac will go to sleep when it's supposed to.

Now, on to a second issue. Apple has an integrated backup facility called Time Machine built into its operating system. I have an external hard drive that I bought almost a year ago for the purpose of these Time Machine backups. It has always worked great, but a few days ago it started exhibiting strange behaviour and would not work correctly. I spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting and looking up error messages online. Nothing I tried seemed to help and I was starting to think it may need to be sent to the manufacturer for repairs or replacement. Fortunately it's just a backup drive, and I also have two separate backups, so it wasn't that much of an issue, aside from the inconvenience.

Long story short, I eventually determined these two issues to be indirectly related. As a part of my troubleshooting, I switched this drive to being plugged directly into the iMac (so I could remove the USB hub), rather than one of the ports on my hub. It seems that for some reason the drive doesn't like that. It only works fine when plugged into the hub. I can't say whether this is a new issue or not, as I think this was the first time since I bought it that I didn't have it plugged into the hub.

So, it appears that I can have either operational Time Machine backups but no automatic sleep mode, or an iMac that goes to sleep but can't update the Time Machine backup. Maybe I'll eventually find a solution, but for now I think I'll give it a rest (no pun intended). Unless my math was wrong, it looks like the difference in power usage between it idling and sleeping will only cost about $1.50 per month tops. And there are other benefits to not letting it sleep (which I won't go into at this time), so perhaps those benefits will actually be worth paying the extra $1.50 for. But still, I don't like not knowing why the drive behaves this way (if it is a hardware issue, it's still under warranty) so I'll probably do some more diagnostics and research as time permits.

Of Mice and Men

Well, I did it. Thursday afternoon on my way home from work, I bought my new iMac. It was perfect timing for me to consider it to be a birthday present for myself, too. The display is great, it can do things that my old one couldn't, and it has about five to six times the power as well. But do you know what? I think the aspect of it that I've been getting the most enjoyment from is not the computer itself, but the mouse that came with it.

Happy Birthday, Mac!

Today is officially the sixth birthday of my Apple PowerMac G5. On July 18, 2004, I took the plunge and drove down to London Drugs to buy it. And to this day, it is still in active service. When I bought it I owned two other PCs but over the years they got decommissioned and I stayed with just my Mac.

And you know what, despite its age it still runs great. It manages my media libraries and feeds my iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. It checks email and web sites. It even can encode video. Maybe there's no way it can run the latest graphically intensive games. And there's no way I can ever upgrade the OS any further than OS X 10.5 (AKA Leopard) since it's no longer supported. But it does everything I need it to and that's the important thing.

Occasionally I contemplate buying a new Mac, and whether the extra features and abilities justify the expense. Yes, video encoding would be over four times the speed. But whether it takes four days or less than one to take transcode those TV season DVDs I just bought really doesn't matter since I won't be watching the show that fast anyway. Yes, all the iMacs have built-in cameras. But I think video chats are just a novelty anyway. And yes, I would have a computer capable of running Sims 3, probably the only computer game I would really like to play (all other games I want to play are on video game consoles).

But is it really worth spending $1,500 or so on a new iMac just for that? As much as I like having new "toys" to play around with I think it probably isn't. There's nothing wrong with it, and maybe it'll end up being another few years before it gets replaced. Or maybe Apple will release a new Mac in the fall that's so amazing that I won't be able to resist the urge to buy one. You never know...