iMac Repair Post #2 -- the Backup Regimen

We're taking a brief break from the chronicle of how our iMac got its new hard drive to describe our backup regimen. Here's what I want my backup strategy to accomplish:

• Survive the failure of any single hard drive.
• Be able to restore all our documents, especially media files (music, photos, videos).
• I'm not interested in restoring my system files, as I prefer to re-install the operating system over restoring a whole system backup. This recovery takes more time but results in (even on a Mac, and especially true on a Windows machine) leaner, speedier, and more stable machine.

The Main Ingredients
The two main ingredients to our backup strategy are Mac OS X's built-in Time Machine feature and a HP MediaSmart EX 485. But alas, as simple as Time Machine is, backup is a little more complicated than just hooking the two up and turning Time Machine on -- mostly because we also have to take into consideration how our media applications (primarily iTunes, iPhoto, but include a host of other less commonly used applications for accessing our music, photos and video) need to use the files.

For all our documents except for our media files -- music, photos, and videos -- it is actually just plug and play. The HP MediaSmart comes with software that makes it look like a Time Machine disk. To set this up:

• Plug the iMac and the MediaSmart into the same switch (in our case, a Linksys WRT54G)
• Install the HP MediaSmart software on the Mac
• Login to the HP MediaSmart Server Control Panel using the MediaSmart's admin username/password (same credentials you use to manage the server itself)
  
• Decide how much space you want to set aside for Time Machine backup (we're using 500GB).

Once you've down this, fire up Time Machine and select the 500GB disk named "Backup to HP MediaSmart Server" as your Time Machine backup disk.

Note: I've heard plenty of horror stories from folks trying to use generic SMB volumes for Time Machine backups. Do so at your own peril, and read up on best practices before you go down that treacherous path.

In the Time Machine Options... window, I've chosen a few directories not to backup:

• The Backup to HP MediaSmart Server disk itself
• The external hard drive containing my virtual machines and photos -- more on this later
• System Files and Applications

Time Machine then goes to work, automatically and continuously backing up all our documents, applications, application settings, and local mail directories.

For our media files, here's what we do:

Music files live on the HP MediaSmart server, managed by iTunes.

• I let iTunes manage the contents of the directory, so there's a folder called iTunes inside the Music directory, and iTunes is mostly ok with pointing to that directory -- provided you make that volume available automatically when you login. Use System Preferences | Accounts to make that happen.
• I let the HP MediaSmart automatically backup the contents of the Music folder to multiple hard drives automatically.
• Finally, I sync the entire contents of my Music library to my 80GB hard-drive based iPod once in a while.
• This means our music library lives on at least 3 hard drives: two inside the HP MediaSmart server, and one in the iPod.
• Since the audio files live on the HP MediaSmart server, most any client can access the music -- our Tivo, other PCs and Macs (via iTunes or Windows Media Player), my iPhone (via HP's iPhone app), and authorized folks on the Web (via HP's Flash-based streaming app).

Photos and videos live on an external hard drive, managed mostly by iPhoto, and which I manually sync to the HP MediaSmart

• I have a Photos directory on an external Firewire 800 hard drive.
• The iPhoto library lives on this external drive.
• We currently have >250GB of photos and videos.
• We use an external drive for performance reasons. iTunes is ok with files living on a slow-to-access network drive, but I doubt iPhoto and iMovie would be ok.
• After loading new photos with iPhoto, I sync the files to my HP MediaSmart from the Terminal:

rsync -avnr --progress /Volumes/MyExternalDisk/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/ /Volumes/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/

• In the above -- MyExternalDisk is the name of my external drive; Photos is the name of the folder the HP MediaSmart exports to the iMac.
• As with Music files, I let the HP MediaSmart duplicate all photos in this directory to multiple internal hard drives.
• So our photos are also on 3 hard drives: the external drive connected to the iMac and 2 drives inside the HP MediaSmart server.
• In addition to this backup, I usually upload photos to Smugmug, where we have an unlimited account which lets us upload anything we want. But we didn't start using Smugmug until about 2.5 years ago, so the archive there is incomplete.

I'm told the new HP MediaSmart servers will do a better job of automatically scooping up media files, even when they live on a Mac. Hopefully folks like me who own the EX485 will get that improved media syncing next year.

Next up: because we don't backup our system files, restoring the OS and applications requires a bit of manual work which I'll describe in the next post. Is it worth the manual tweaking? I think so.

Even on a Mac, systems accumulate crud over time, and a fresh install gets your system back to its factory-fresh -- read: speedy -- state. A factory fresh install of Snow Leopard feels snappier than one that started as 10.4.x and eventually made its way to 10.6.x. This is of course even more true for Windows machines, which I'll routinely rebuild every 6-12 months as a matter of system maintenance completely independent of backup needs. We'll see if Windows 7 makes this unnecessary, but, as one of the new Mac ads point out, this seems unlikely:

iMac repair post #1

As promised, here is my first in a series of posts about our experience getting our beloved iMac fixed. We got our iMac in April 2008 off Craigslist from someone who was planning to get a Macbook instead. She originally bought it in the fall of 2007 and had bought an AppleCare extended warranty on it. Boy, am I glad she did -- and that the warranty was transferrable. (The seller was a paralegal and had carefully highlighted the clause authorizing transfers in the warranty agreement -- nice!)

After transferring the warranty online, I promptly forgot all about it. Until, of course, when the hard drive started acting funny last Friday. Since the original warranty had expired, I was sure glad we had gotten AppleCare. We don't usually buy extended warranties on our consumer electronics or computer parts, but this purchase turned out to be a good gamble.  (At the store while picking up my machine a few days later, I asked how much it would have cost to just pay out of pocket for the repair. The reply: $85 to troubleshoot, plus around $300 for the 320GB drive. Ouch!)

Sometimes we would see that question mark at boot time. Once or twice, I got the machine to boot, but it will take 10 minutes. "What is this," I thought, "a Windows machine?"  :-)

Next stop: Google. 

• I tried rebooting while holding down various keys down to reset the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM. No dice. 
• I tried booting from the Mac OS X installation disc which came with the machine to run Disk Utility, which "saw" the drive. I tried tried running Disk First Aid, which took about 15 minutes and failed halfway through its session. Uh-oh.
• The next time I booted from the OS X installation disc, Disk Utility didn't even "see" the drive. Double uh-oh.

Next station: AppleCare tech support. I called in Saturday morning.

The technician had me basically repeat the above. When that didn't work, he tried to have me boot from a utility CD-ROM which came with the AppleCare Protection Plan. It had TechTool Deluxe on it, a diagnostic utility, but it wouldn't boot for some reason. During one of our reboot-while-holding-down-the-option-key sessions, the Startup Manager launched and "saw" the drive.  So we selected it and the iMac got through about 1/3 of its boot sequence in 5 minutes.

At that point, we gave up, and the tech support rep made an appointment for me to take it down to my local Apple Store later that afternoon. It's nice that he was able to do this so I didn't have to.

Overall, the session lasted a little under an hour and would have been way better if (1) the phone connection had less delay (call center in India?) and (2) the technician  had listened more instead of just walking through his troubleshooting checklist without listening to what I had already done. Overall, I'd give them a B for the overall phone tech support experience.

  

Next post: the Apple Store repair experience.

Our iMac is back, as good as new

You do not want to see this icon when you boot your Mac. It means your Mac can't boot off its internal hard drive.

The best case is that the disk's volume data (essentially, your hard drive's table of contents) has somehow gotten corrupted or the Mac has forgotten which disk to boot, both of which can be fixed with special reboots or Disk Utility from your Mac startup CD or DVD.

The worst case (as it was for us) means that your hard drive is dead and needs to be replaced.

In my role as "tech support for my friends and family", I've gotten a bunch of questions about what happened and what my backup regimen is. So over the next few posts, I'll describe what happened, what I did to restore our data, my experiences with Apple tech support, and what we do to backup data.

Here's the Reader's Digest version:

• After a call with Apple tech support where we tried various reboots and software-based repairs, I took the iMac down to the local Apple Store and they replaced the drive with a brand new one.
• We had a Time Machine backup on the HP MediaSmart server, so we didn't lose any data.
• After restoring from Time Machine (my first successful computer restore experience ever, I think) and a few application re-installs (most Mac apps don't need this, but I'll name names for the few which do), we're back in action. Hurrah!

Details coming soon, but if you have not backed up, please please please do so. This is 100x true for the drive with your completely irreplaceable videos and pictures. These days, even Quicken data doesn't seem that sacred to me -- but our pictures and videos absolutely are. (Thankfully, our photos were on an external drive which is itself backed up to two separate drives in the MediaSmart server, so they weren't on the drive that failed.)

Our family does not have a physical disaster emergency prepardness plan (yes, I know -- it's on the list with getting our trust notarized), but we do have a data disaster plan. You should too, if any of your data is important to you.

Snow Leopard

So I've upgraded to Snow Leopard on two machine (my latest generation work Macbook Pro and my home, slightly older iMac). The upgrade process itself was very smooth: the installer does all the work, reboots the machine a few times, and freed about 20 gigs of space on my boot disk. Can't remember ever seeing that any software upgrade.

Only a few things changed, none of them dramatic but all of them useful in their own way. It boots, sleeps, and resumes even faster than before. Day-to-day use feels marginally speedier -- mostly because it the Finder and Safari are both faster. I have not encountered any apps that won't launch or devices that don't work. I was a little worried about the scanner in my Canon Pixma MP500 because the Apple site reported it did not ship with Canon scanner drivers baked into Leopard, but the Canon software worked just fine.

On the flip side:

• iPhoto 08 won't play videos anymore. This one makes me mad, because Apple should have caught this trivial-to-fix bug in their own product family.
• Symptom: If you find the files in the iPhoto library from the Finder, they'll fire up just fine. But if you double click on videos in iPhoto, nothing happens.
• I'm surprised they didn't fix this in 10.6.1. I hope they fix this in the next week or two. Handling photos and videos is one of the reasons I switched to a Mac in the first place.
• My Logitech mouse's special buttons don't work. The Logitech forums speculate that an updated version of Logitech Control Center is coming soon.
• Suggested workarounds seemed to work for me the first few days but have since quit working (the Control Center stopped recognizing my MX700 mouse).

Other than that, I'm pleased overall. It does seem a little lame that Apple is charging as if this was an upgrade rather than a dot release. But I guess by comparison, it seems like way smaller a rip off than what Microsoft is charging for Vista Service Pack 2, er, Windows 7.

Also, not looking to the complete re-install Microsoft is going to force me to do to upgrade from my Windows 7 Release Candidate.

Update on 9/15/09: For some reason, the Logitech workarounds worked the 2nd or 3rd time around. I ran the installer from inside the Logitech Control Center 3.0 package, rebooted, and it recognized my MX700 mouse. Then copying Expose from the /Applications/Utilities folder to /Applications got the Expose mouse button shortcut working. OK, Apple, it's all you now: get your own products to work with your own operating system, please.

More fun with Photo Booth

Um, are you supposed to do anything productive with the built in camera? If so, someone should let us know what that is because we haven't figured that out. :-)

One month with our iMac

Alas, I don't get to go to Apple's developer conference next week. I heard they sold out pretty early, and I couldn't really justify HP sending me since (1) I'm not a developer and (2) my products don't run on Macs (sigh).

But I do have some observations after living with our iMac for a month:

• It's a delight to use. It does the same things as a Windows PC, but it does them faster, more consistently, more beautifully, and more thoughtfully. There's something about the visual design of the OS that makes nearly every application pop -- even the cross-platform ones such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
  
  
• The iMac is very, very quiet. We still have our Dell and hadn't realized how much noise its fan and other components were making until we starting running the whisper-quiet iMac.
  
  
• It was relatively straightforward to switch, but definitely not "free". Most documents came over without a hitch (including Microsoft's new Microsoft Office 97 file formats like .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx -- Apple iWorks and TextEdit open these files just fine), but it was a bit of a pain converting from Picasa to iPhoto. They store and search photos differently, and unfortunately you have to fuss with this a bit to convert. Also was more of a pain converting to sync my iPod from my iMac rather than my Windows machine than I had expected it would be.
  
  
• Windows runs fine on my iMac via VMware Fusion. I still use Windows for a few things: (1) Quicken, (2) watching videos from Netflix, and (3) Outlook for work emails (via the work VPN). For (1) and (2), there are no known substitutes (don't get my started about how pathetic Quicken for Mac is). For (3), I haven't been able to get OpenVPN working though some of my coworkers have.
  
  
• The on-line help + Mac community are very helpful. I've been able to find answers to my questions very easily. The on-line help answers my questions about half the time, and Google delivers the balance. In fact, the info I need is typically the first or second search result in Google. Try that on Windows.
  
  
• The OS still matters. In this Web-centric world of ours, I was surprised at how much the OS still matters. How?

1. Rock solid. No random reboots, no blue-screen-of-death, no super long boot or go-to-sleep cycle, no cryptic error messages, no strange lags where all of a sudden the GUI becomes non-responsive.
2. Search works. It helps me find files because its built in search (Spotlight) is fast, useful, and completely transparent.
3. It's consistent, which encourages its applications to be consistent. Consistency helps me be more productive. The OS and its apps are consistent in the big things (like application installation and removal), the medium things (applications typically store their preferences in the /library directory) and the small things like keyboard shortcuts: cmd-w always always closes a window, cmd-comma always opens preferences, cmd-m always minimizes an application.
4. It lets me use the computer. MacOS lets me use the computer's resources rather than consuming them to scan for viruses, clean up the registry, defragment its hard drives, index documents, and more. You don't notice how much time you spend on the care and feeding of your PC until you start using an OS where you don't do it.
5. Time Machine just works. I've used it twice already. Once was to rescue my Thunderbird address book after an accidental sync with Plaxo completely erased all my contacts. It's slick.
   

A few things I don't like about the Mac:

• You can only resize a window from the bottom right corner instead of any edge of the window.
  
• Keyboard shortcuts for cursor movement and copy, paste, undo, etc. are different from their Windows counterparts. I've remapped the keyboard, but the problem is that the Mac uses a different modifier key to skip words (option + right/left arrow) versus copy, paste, undo (command-c, x, and z) -- whereas Windows uses the same key (ctrl).
• I miss the Window-E key to open Windows Explorer and Windows-D to hide all apps and show the desktop. I use Quicksilver to do something similar for the Finder, but it doesn't always work the way I expect it to.
• My Mac sometimes forgets its modifier key mappings, a well documented problem with external USB keyboards. To fix, I have to open the keyboard preferences and "remind" it. Lame.
• The .mac service is a missed opportunity: over-priced and under-powered. Maybe Apple will announce a more useful feature set with lower pricing next week. Apple should either make .mac competitive or make it easier for the native applications to integrate with the winning services such as Flickr, Smugmug, and regular Web hosting services.
  
• Fusion slows the machine down quite a bit. Hopefully this is because it's a beta and the production version will speed it up. Also it's not quite fast to run even old Windows games.
  

Some observations about the Mac

Some thoughts on my first weekend with MacOS X (the last time I ran a Mac, I'm not even sure what number the OS was -- I don't remember them keeping score in the late 80s or early 90s!).

• It's fast: very, very fast. Even though I only have 1 gig of RAM in my iMac, things that really matter are blazingly fast: startup, restart, sleep, resume from sleep, application launch, document browsing, Web browsing, searching (Spotlight), and I could go on. It fees like the designers optimized all their work for typical end user actions, as opposed to whatever the developers in Redmond are optimizing for (the machine? billg? security?).
  
  
• It plays well with others. I plugged my old Brother laser printer into a USB port, and Leopard happily found the driver, installed it and made the printer show up in the Printers list. Ditto for everything else I've plugged in so far. (Also nice: since the laser printer has two ports, I can now share the printer across the Mac and PC without a print server or network connection.) The only device which required me actually hunting down a driver? You guessed it: a Microsoft keyboard.
  
  
• It's a better Windows client than Windows. Without me lifting a finger, it found and presented the shared folders on my nearby Dell desktop. I still haven't figured out how to make that happen on my work Windows XP laptop.
  
  
• It's consistent. Installation, keyboard shortcuts, navigation, and just overall behavior seem very consistent across applications.
  

On the flip side:

• Menus and windows. I'm not a big fan of the menu bar being fixed to the top of the screen as opposed to attached to individual windows.
  
  
• Modifier keys are in different places and do different things. The location of the modifier keys will take some getting used to (Ctrl-Windows-Alt versus Control-Option-Command).
  
  
• More later as I play some more. Still looking for the one key equivalent to opening My Computer (Windows-e), which I did all the time on Windows and found very useful.
  

Breakfast at home

Our first photo post from a Mac: not as straightforward to add photos since iPhoto doesn't have out of the box integration with Picasa (rumor has it there's a Mac version of Picasa coming later this year, which might be nice).

Still, since iPhoto browsing is built into the upload menu, finding the photo was much easier than on a Windows machine, a task which I had come to dread (find the photo in Picasa, memorize the filename, navigate to it using the "Open" dialog...).

Also, iPhoto's editing tools allowed me to tame the overexposed portions of the picture above a little better than Picasa. It was a little harder to use, but I like the control.

Anyway, we enjoyed a quiet weekend at home. I love it when we have time to make breakfast and have fun with it -- like arranging your sausages in a smiley-face pattern. :-)

We got a Mac!

Well, I had been planning to wait to the end of the year to get a Mac -- or at least until the new iMacs, which are rumored to be announced next week. But I just couldn't resist a good Craigslist deal, so we've begun our transition to the world of Jobs. Here's our Photo Booth inauguration to go along with our very first blog post written on a Mac. :-)

I'll be posting about our transition experience using the keyword mac so you can follow along.