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Backup and File Synchronisation Software for Apple OS X

Published September 12, 2006

For a background on how this review came about and on some of the nuances of using these backup and file synchronisation utilities in stress testing, please see my post on Input/Output Errors in OS X during Back Up.

Backup and File Synchronisation Software for Apple OS X Major Players

SuperDuper! – super when it works. Gets best of breed in a highly technical review of these backup utilities (well worth reading). Priced right at $28. Quality demo (only SmartUpdate not available). Every reason to use and buy. Will not succeed against I/O errors however. Helpful and friendly support. No draconian license policy. Highly recommended.

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) – Freeware. Extensive documentation. But seen better days as creator Mike Bombich was hired by Apple a couple of years ago and can’t spend as much time on it as he used to. At its best with OS 10.2.

ASR (Apple System Restore) – Freeware. Perhaps this is what Mike Bombich has been up to while at Apple. A very good and robust solution that only seems to fail with I/O issues and that it creates only disk images rather than bootable volumes (except as a 2 step, image and then volume). Here are Apple’s instructions for use:

For backup quality and speed, it’s hard to beat Apple Software Restore (ASR). This is the program used to build software restore CDs on HFS+ volumes. To use ASR, make an image of your disk using Disk Utility (use Create Image From Directory, not Create Image From Device); this backup can then be restored onto other disks, or even the same disk. ASR can restore in place, or by reformatting a disk and copying files onto it. In many cases, the latter usage is much faster, but of course it does remove any existing files.

Synchronize! Pro X – $100 – can do folder synchronization, incremental backups and will not fail against bad sectors and I/O errors. Any drive reporting bad sectors and I/O errors should be retired from service anyway, not repaired. Original license policy very reasonable – personal license for personal comptuers. Ridiculous license policy implemented around version 3.4 driving many users from the product: license valid for a single computer. Subsequently modified to allow a full version on one computer (with scheduling) and occasional use from a secondary computer. Unfortunately developer is aggressive and snarky. On the telephone he asks questions like “Do you even know how to read?” If he would fix his attitude and his license policy, the product is utilitarian and excellent. Reading through the entire VersionTracker section, alas it seems unlikely that Qdea’s Mr. Sontag will ever be a nice friendly man. To some people, this issue may be unimportant. There is also some risk with a one man operation in such a specialilsed sphere with a comparatively expensive product that Mr. Sontag may leave the software business (by inclination, by illness, by death). Or he wouldn’t like your questions and decide to cut off support and rescind your license (I believe he’s done that at least once). Of course for a single copy that is less of an issue but with a site license, I would be concerned.

InTech QuickBack. Part of a whole suite with a reasonable overall cost of $90. InTech Speed Utilities come in an non-upgradeable version with lots of hard drives (where I discovered it). I haven’t successfully used the QuickBack part of the suite but based on MediaScanner and Quickbench performance, I have no reason to doubt that it is as effective as any other bootable backup utility apart from SuperDuper who have their own and superior engine.

LaCie SilverKeeper. Free. Not very attractive but very effective. Reasonably quick. Maintained regularly (current version 1.1.4 updated for 10.4). Highly recommended alternative low cost solution. It is a backup utility not a file sync utility unfortunately.

Unison. Free. Open source. A pain to setup. You need to create sets, you cannot just work on the fly. Very good tracking of changes though. A true industrial sync solution. Programmers and command line junkies should look no further.

Recommended arsenal for backup:

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EXIF Photo Orientation and OS Xjpeg-landscape-orientation-exif

EXIF Photo Orientation and OS X

Published September 7, 2006

Photo orientation is the way your photos look coming out of the camera – there are two alternatives Landscape (horizontal) and Portrait (vertical).

Landscape Orientation
Landscape Orientation
Portrait Orientation
Portrait Orientation

Many modern cameras digital include a sensor which tells the camera if it is in Portrait or Landscape mode. This includes most modern Canon and Nikon cameras, as well as those of other manufacturers but not including, notably for me, Pentax DSLR up to the *ist DS.

How does it work? The camera leaves a comment on the EXIF file for image software to rotate the camera the same way it was held at the time the picture was taken. Technically this is done with an orientation tag embedded into the picture.

Many image software applications handle these rotations automatically in their most recent versions. In principle, automated photo orientation based on EXIF tags should be a very good thing, saving the user time and trouble. In fact, EXIF based photo orientation is a mixed lot for the end user.

Image software packages handle EXIF orientation in various and complex ways. At a basic level, some software ignores the tag altogether. It’s when the software acts on EXIF orientation things get complicated.

In Mac OS X 10.3.9, Apple’s built-in image and PDF browser preview ignores this tag (Preview version 2.1). Apparently in Mac OS 10.4, Preview recognises the tag and performs the rotation automatically.

iView MediaPro recognises the orientation tag as well (version 3.1.1 and I believe has done so from version 2.6 and up). iPhoto does as well (from version 5 and up but somebody else will have to test this as I won’t run iPhoto on my computer – a friend lost half of her European pictures to its vagaries).

When it comes time to opening your pictures in Photoshop or Elements, you’re also covered. The image will show up correctly orientated. When you save a copy out of Photoshop it will stay that way.

All well and good.

But in the end, the automatic rotation won’t save you when it’s game time and its time to post your images…

As soon as you you try to upload your automatically oriented pictures, a rude surprise awaits. Your images are all sideways!

Auto Rotate Online
Auto Rotated Image Online – Oops
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Sore Losersolim

Sore Losers

Published August 16, 2006

At this point (I don’t write this war off yet), the Israelis are big losers in Lebanon. Hezbollah is still armed, the Israelis are on their way out of Lebanon and the entire IDF and political leadership of Israel comes off as bullies, murderers and war criminals.

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Goebbels file: Anglos voice Israel’s case to foreign media

Published August 16, 2006

Anglos voice Israel’s case to foreign media | Jerusalem Post: Anglo-Israelis know how to better shape a message because they know how its received, Spigelman argued. “We can understand how things sound to an international audience because we were once part of the international audience.”That knowledge is what leads the IDF Spokesman’s Office to release different tapes of army operations to local and foreign journalists.

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Why Israel stopped the war

Published August 16, 2006

The West DOES see mike – USA 08/15/2006 22:45 The West, like the rest of the goy world, wants to destroy Israel and exterminate the Jewish people…. Israel had the means, the will, and the force to win, but because of our inexperienced and fearful political and military leaders, that is Olmert, Peretz, Livni, and Halultz, we not only gave Hizbulla a victory over us, we gave them a victory over Lebanon.

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Trouble with ectoize bookmarklet and Firefox?ectoize-screenshot

Trouble with ectoize bookmarklet and Firefox?

Published August 11, 2006

I had been using ecto and the ectoize bookmarklet for a long time to log useful info off the web.

What ectoize does is it copies any text you have selected on a webpage and copies it into a new entry along with the page title enclosed in an hyperlink to the original page. At that point, you can either just log the quotation or if you want to post about it, you can quickly write around the core of the entry. It automates creating a weblog entry and then handcopying the URL and the text and pasting them into the new entry.

One day I managed to disable ectoize in Firefox by pressing enter while the ‘Remember this choice for all future instances’ box was ticked.

I was unable to reenable the ectoize bookmarklet – once fully disabled, clicking on the bookmarklet does nothing. Nowhere in the Firefox preferences can you fix this. It’s not listed under Application Helpers.

I have it working again now, but the solution is very hard to find. It’s buried in a forum entry over in the Kula support forum which doesn’t appear to be indexed by Google. So here is the solution where everybody can find it.

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Israel Supporters

Published August 10, 2006

The Jerusalem Post is a paper of record in Israel. I believe it’s owned by that magnate of the new world order and proponent of 21st century colonialism Conrad Black.

Here are the kinds of things their readers write today:

123. Finish the Job
Major - USA
08/10/2006 05:13

I am glad you are ignoring the weak sisters of Europe and the UN….. Those EU governments have become so unbelievably corrupt, it makes me sick to my stomach… Unfortunately, you started out fighting this too methodically….all the key targets should have been massively destroyed the first week…all the key assassinations the first day….Nasrullah should have been taken out the first hour of the war… A lengthy war gives the terrorist appeasers time to martial their propaganda machine … You had Iran and Syria cowering the first week…but since you didnt apply overwhelming force, they have become emboldened… You still need to finish them off…or you will have wasted your war.

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