Blog Archives
how to tell if iCloud Drive is up-to-date
I tend to work on the iMac at home, then take an MBP to work. Several times I’ve thought iCloud had uploaded what I had been working on at home before I left, only to find that when I got to work, the old version was still the latest one on iCloud. Of course, I checked for the spinning little progress indicator, but apparently I either missed it or it didn’t appear.
To mitigate this problem, I came up with this script to tell me what iCloud daemon is doing. If files are pending update or being updated, it will indicate which ones. It will also tell me if the iCloud daemon is either idle or busy / not responding.
Get the iCloud Daemon Script from my pastebin
Enjoy! 🙂
iCloud Drive “file couldn’t be opened”
Today I encountered a problem in which none of my files on iCloud could be opened. The issue (almost certainly self-inflicted after I’d been poking around in iCloud’s underbelly…) was peculiar in a couple of ways.
Although all files refused to open, Quick Look had no problem displaying every file’s contents (shame that we lost the ability to cut and paste from Quick Look in El Capitan, as that would have presented me with an option for recovery). Another oddity was that iCloud files that were currently open could still be saved to, but once closed, refused to open, showing the dialog above. Yet more worrying was that neither copying and pasting a file to another location outside of iCloud with the Finder nor trying to restore from Time Machine worked.
Logging out and logging back in again also did not resolve the problem, as I’d hoped. However, I was prevented from just trying a full restart as I had critical processes running elsewhere on the computer.
One option that I successfully employed was to use the ditto tool on the command line to copy a Pages document to another location (note that the Pages format is actually a directory rather than a single file, so ditto is a good tool for this). However, while this might be useful in an emergency, it’s hardly a practical solution to repairing the whole of the iCloud Drive.
Instead, I took the seemingly scary option of unlinking the mac from iCloud Drive in System Preferences > iCloud. You’ll get a warning like this:
I then re-enabled iCloud in the hope that this would refresh whatever it was that had become out-of-sorts. Unfortunately, that still didn’t work. I next tried unlinking again, logging out and re-linking after logging in. Still no dice, and by this time I was sufficiently worried that there was nothing for it but to halt all my other activities on the computer and try a restart. Possibly the system holds something in a memory cache that needs to be flushed, I’m not sure. In any case, I took the step of unlinking iCloud first, then restarting, then re-linking after reboot. Success (and relief)!
I don’t fancy trying to reproduce the issue to see if the reboot alone would have solved it, but that would be my first step if the issue occurs again. Otherwise, the unlink, reboot, and re-link method seems to do the trick.
🙂
easy way to install Ubuntu on Mac OS X
If you have Parallels or VMFusion, you can download and run Ubuntu as a guest OS for free. Ubuntu has some nice features including a Spaces-like desktop switcher and loads of free software available in the Ubuntu App Store.
For those still on Snow Leopard but wishing they could have the benefits of iCloud, Ubuntu provides an interesting option: the open source OS comes with its own Cloud service and 5GB free space. You can sync it with Windows, Android and iOS, and it even allows you to stream music from the Cloud to your devices. If you run Ubuntu in Parallel’s ‘Coherence’ mode, you can take advantage of Ubuntu’s mail, calendar and music apps and have all your other devices synced to your Mac.
If you want to read more, go to the Ubuntu website. When you’re ready to give it a spin, it couldn’t be simpler:
1. Go to the Ubuntu download page, and choose either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your current Mac OS (if you’re running SL 10.6.8 or later, go for the 64-bit). Ignore the advice about creating a CD or USB stick (it doesn’t apply to us as we’re going to install it via Parallels).
2. Click the big red/orange ‘Download’ box, and make a cup of tea while the .iso file downloads to your computer.
3. After the download has finished, start up Parallels. From the Parallels Desktop menubar, choose File > New.
4. From the resulting dialogue box, click the drop down menu and select Choose an image file…. Browse to your downloads folder and choose the .iso file you downloaded in step 1.
5. From here on in, Parallels will pretty much take care of everything else for you. Your virtual machine will restart a couple of times and you will get asked to choose a couple of options (like setting a language, region and password), but it’s all fairly self-explanatory. Accept the default options for now.
When the install finishes, the first thing to do before trying it out is to set the amount of RAM available to the Ubuntu install. You’d want to set this to at least 2GB, but 4GB is better to get a really fast machine.
6. To set the RAM, first shut down Ubuntu. Do so by going to the Parallels menubar and choosing Virtual Machine > Shutdown.
7. After the OS has shutdown, go back to the Parallels menubar and choose Virtual Machine > Configure. Click on General and set the slider to as much RAM as you can spare…
8. Finally, go play! Depending on your download speed, the whole procedure shouldn’t take much more than an hour or so. If you need documentation, just go back to the Ubuntu site and you’ll find plenty of resources there.
Enjoy. 🙂
how to back up your Mac – the best way!
iCloud? Time Machine? Noooo……! We’re talking about the best way to backup your precious data, not the most convenient way…
What’s wrong with using the cloud? The fact that you need an internet connection, a password to be accepted, to act in accordance with the T&C of your cloud provider, the fact that someone – government, corporation, hacker – could interfere with your data, lose it or just add unwanted stuff to it. Also, if you want to backup your whole system then the various free storage offers are not going to be big enough to do the job, and you’re going to end up paying a lot more than if you backup your system properly.
How about Time Machine? Yes, it’s simple and convenient and pretty much automatic, but its not secure. TM has three major problems. First, it doesn’t allow proper archiving so anything you delete from your HDD will eventually get deleted from TM. Second, it doesn’t tell you what it’s doing before it does it, meaning you are at the mercy of its automated decisions. Third, it’s not bootable. If your whole system crashes or your HDD just fails, Time Machine won’t help you. You’ll have to restore the system or replace the HDD before you can use your machine again.
But there is a much better way, and aside from you providing the hardware (a couple of external hard disks), one that’s also free. The most secure system is to run an hourly or daily scheduled cloner on one disk, and a weekly cloner on the other. You can use SuperDuper or, my own favourite, Carbon Copy Cloner.
If you want to read up on and understand the various backup options and what they entail, you can’t do better than to read this superb post by Apple Discussions member ds store.
applehelpwriter.com 