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Tag: apple

  • Suspenders and a Belt: Tips for backin’ up your Mac

    The Mac has Time Machine built right in
    The Mac has Time Machine built right in

    A co-worker has been working on a reporting tool to allow a Mac user to get reports from Time Machine whenever there’s a failure in the backup. Failure messages occasionally come up when Time Machine runs, but it never says what folder, what file or really what kind of failure occured. Which is not what you want if you are absolutely depending on the data being recoverable via Time Machine. It’s not bulletproof and it will lull you into complacency once you have it up and running. I tend to agree that a belt and suspenders approach is best. I’ve read countless articles saying Disk Clones are the best, and on the other side, Incremental Backups are most accurate (in terms of having the latest version of a file) and more efficient with disk space (no need to duplicate the system folder again right?) With the cost of Western Digital My Books dropping all the time, you could purchase two separate USB2 Lifebooks, use a disk cloning utility for one drive, Time Machine for the other. Then you would have a bullet proof backup scheme. One reader commented in this article that off-site backup is necessary as well, so include that as the third leg of your backup triad.

    Since errors and failure can happen in any backup system, we recommend that if you have the available resources (namely, spare external hard drives) that you set up dual, independent backups, and, in doing so, take advantage of more than one way of backing up your system. This will prevent any errors in a backup system from propagating to subsequent backups.

    One strongly recommended solution that we advocate is to have both a snapshot-based system such as Time Machine in addition to a bootable clone system as well using a software package such as SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Doing this will ensure you can both boot and access your most recently changed files in the event of either data loss or hardware failure.

    via MacFixIt

  • On the verge of H.264

    It’s no secret Robert X. Cringely follows the strategic directions of Apple’s laptop/desktop design teams:

    Ctrl-Alt-Del Oct. 20, 2008
    The Eyes Have It Aug.1, 2008
    Let the Chips Fall July 12, 2007
    The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007 Mar 8, 2007

    In Robert X. Cringley’s recent posting on PBS.org brings up the topic of Apple’s attempt to incorporate H.264 into their product line. New buyers of the most recently introduced Mac laptops have rushed to measure the CPU load of their machines while playing back HD TV and Movie content downloaded from the iTunes store. CPU’s are now only idling along at 20% capacity versus the old 100%+ experienced in the previous generation of Mac desktops and laptops. Where is the secret sauce?

    Cringley expected NTT of Japan to provide a special custom made encoder/decoder chip specifically geared for the H.264 codec. However nowhere in the current tear downs of the the MacBook and MacBook Pro has anyone identified a free standing chip doing the offloading of H.264 decoding. Now he’s speculating the chip might have been licensed as a ‘core’ by nVidia and incorporated into the new fully integrated chipset that drives all the I/O on the motherboard. Somewhere in there maybe even in the 16 cores of the video processor some kind of H.264 decoding acceleration is going on. But it’s not being touted very widely by the Apple marketing machine.

    Cringely suspects there’s a reason to soft pedal H.264 acceleration on the new Macintoshes. While iTunes has been in the past nothing more than a means to an end (you want to sell iPods? Well get the content to play on them first!), the burgeoning field of online content distribution may be the next big end. Netflix has shown that even in a snail mail distribution  network, there is potential for a profit to be made. But as I’ve heard coworkers repeat in the past, where’s the profit of letting someone OWN the content. There is a feeling amongst a number of internet bloggers, consultants, and insiders that Hollywood wants to rent, not let you own the creative output of their studios. Whether it be music, TV or film you have to pay in order play. A one time ownership fee is a hard way to make a living. But future payments for each viewing, now that’s a guaranteed revenue stream.

    What’s standing in the way of the stream is the series of tubes. The interwebs as they exist in the U.S. today make the Netflix distribution network far more workable and profitable than any attempt to push 5GB of HD versions of SpiderMan 3 into your Apple TV. The network will not allow for this to work on any scale right now. So the first step in the plan is to get H.264 decoding to work effortlessly on Mac products then sit back and wait and hope somehow the network will evolve to the level that Steve Jobs thinks it should.

    What would lead Steve Jobs to think the network is going to rush in and save the day? How many articles do you read on Slashdot regularly about how far behind the U.S. is when it comes to Internet infrastructure? Why does anyone at Apple think this is going to work? It’s quite a stretch, and I don’t see it happening in my lifetime. Good Luck Apple.