The now daily Time Machine Error

Rarely a day goes by now that Time Machine doesn't produce the dreaded Time Machine Error warning: "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Ironically I get this more on my Mac Pro with dual internal hard drives that check out fine rather than my little MacBook with the slow USB based drive for backup.

Since Time Machine runs hourly I'll get 23 to 47 backups that work fine, then the error. It's always a single file that seems to blow out the backup and generate the message: 

I haven't encountered this on my MacBook Pro yet, only on my Mac Pro. The time machine icon in the menu bar shows this:

I first encountered this problem at the beginning of June and it is definitely a byproduct of the 10.5.3 update. Jeff McCord has documented similar problems on his blog. There seems to be two solutions that work for me:

1) Try again. About half the time just telling Time Machine to try again seems to work.

2) Look at the backup volume. If there is a file on your backup volume that ends in "inProgress" then drag it to the trash can. You'll be prompted to enter your password. Once done try Time Machine again.

I'm getting a lot of hits on this blog from people searching for Time Machine Error so hopefully this abbreviated solution set will help them clear the error until Apple fixes it.

I have read reports of people saying this may be related to using Growl—which I use with several of my applications—though I only seem to be seeing this error consistently on my Mac Pro. Though a relatively minor error that is easily recovered from, often by doing nothing but letting Time Machine try again, I would really like to see it eliminated.

The case of the cracked MacBook case

I've had my MacBook for a total of 4 months now and have generally loved the little machine, so much so that I switched to Mac completely, dropping Windows and buying a Mac Pro. There has however been one problem that has cropped up recently that is rather frustrating. The front of the MacBook palm rest area has developed a hair-line crack in it.

I treat this machine quite well and am very careful with it so the fact that it cracked after just four months of ownership is pretty disappointing. When I say I treat it well I mean "kid gloves" well. I've never dropped the machine or even handled it roughly. I gently open and close the lid, careful not to let it slam shut. If I take it anywhere it is immediately placed into a snug black neoprene Incase sleeve. Travel means the MacBook is first placed inside the Incase sleeve and then placed inside a padded laptop briefcase. Kid gloves.

My oldest daughter's MacBook on the other hand has developed no such crack, even though it is 7 months older and treated with a tiny fraction of the care mine receives. Hers has a large decal on the shell and makeup stains from residing in her cramped college dorm room. When it's not laying around on a couch or coffee table it is crammed into a large bag with enough female products to go camping for several weeks. Yet hers is fine.

I did a little research on the interwebs and sure enough a large number of people have experienced the same exact problem I have. It even got so bad that Fake Steve Jobs put up a note about it in December.

Not pleased about this I called up Apple Care. The gentleman told me that I could either take the machine to a nearby Apple store for repair or they would send out a box so that I could pack up my precious machine, ship it to them for repair, then they would send it back to me. Since I have an Apple store about 30 minutes away that was my preferred method.

The earliest I can get to the Apple Care store is Monday so this will have to wait until then; I'll add information on this as I go. When I put up a post in April about how to clean a MacBook case with Mr. Clean Magic Erasers Charles mentioned in the comments that the top of the case may be one of the "problem" ones that were not varnished properly. Hopefully when this is repaired it will address the fact that the palm rests gets dirty so easily too. 

In the meantime I will be using a machine that sharply pokes right into underside of my wrist as I type. 

Ouch.

Update: Check out this Flickr group dedicated to MacBook case cracks.

Fixing a simple Time Machine error

This morning I nudged the mouse on my Mac Pro and was welcomed with the following window:

Funny thing is that the dialog has an OK button. It's really not OK. Why not? Because it didn't tell me where the problem was.

As I've said before, I love the simplicity of Time Machine, though presenting an error message like this is not very helpful. Something - anything - to indicate what went wrong would be a good idea. I accept that you don't want to scare off the non-techies with a detailed error message but having a little "more" link that described what the problem is would have helped.

Rather than investigate I decided to go with the flow. I clicked the OK button and then told Time Machine to back up now. It happily whirred away and looked like everything was fine, then at the very end up popped the failure notification again. Crap.

I did what I always do when something unexpected happens on my computer: I Google'd up the error message. There were a number of solutions offered up, many involving reformatting the TM drive. I felt that was a little drastic so I looked into the Backup drive in Finder and saw that the last folder was:

2008-05-30-064104.inProgress

I dragged that folder into the Trash can and was prompted for my login credentials. The file was whisked away and I asked Time Machine to do another backup and it proceeded fine.

Finding out what happened

Wanting to understand why this occurred I popped around looking for logs. In reviewing the current System Log (/var/log/system.log) I found entries that indicated one of my Growl plugins had a problem being written to the backup. Once that occurred the "in progress" backup file was corrupted and needed to be deleted in order for Time Machine to continue.

I'm not sure what caused the problem. The backup and main disks appear to be operating fine; I ran Disk Utility's Verify Disk on both and they came up clean. Perhaps a Growl notification opened the plugin in mid-read? Not too sure but it all seems fine now.

If you happen to get the error message above you may want to just check your backup volumes to see if you've got an open backup that's listed as In Progress, even though Time Machine is not running. Try deleting that to see if it allows your backups to continue. At least that's what worked for me!

Sync with Google Contacts in 10.5.3 - Not

I was scanning through the news feeds yesterday and came across an official Google Mac Blog post that says I can now synchronize my Google contact list with my local address book. There's even a nice little picture of it:

So after updating to 10.5.3 I fired up Address Book and looked at the preferences but the Google Sync option at the bottom was missing. I did a little research and apparently this is only an option if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch that's been hooked to your Mac. I'd love an iPhone but I don't have one so apparently the option is not available to me. I don't really understand the logic behind that one.

A note to the Google folks that run that blog: perhaps you should update your article to reflect that this only works if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch?

Lifehacker (an outstanding site) has a hack that is supposed to get it working on Macs that are not tethered to an iPhone or Touch.  Turns out there are some problems with using that method based on the comments under the article though so I held off on trying it myself.

Do I really want to sync with Google Contacts anyway?

While going through and trying to figure out if I wanted to make this work I started thinking through how my Google Contact list is used compared to my address book. Gmail automatically adds every person you send an e-mail to into your Contacts list - there is no option to turn that off.  I was once asked to send an e-mail out to the parents of my son's football team - a list that had over 90 people on it I don't communicate with often at all - yet all of them are now parked in my Contact list.

Until Google gives me the option in Gmail to not auto-add every single person into my address book I don't see the value in it. My address book will be populated with hundreds of people that I don't even have a name or phone number for, just a cryptic e-mail address.

For once I'm really glad I found a feature that didn't work.

Make Spotlight find your kind of files

Spotlight is a great feature in Leopard, one that I use every day. My primary use up until lately has been to launch applications with it; if I don't see the application I want in the Dock bar I simply hit Command-Space and type in the first few letters of the application. Since applications are pushed to the top I can often just hit Return and my application is loading up. Even if the application is in the Dock bar sometimes I'll use Spotlight because it's so quick.

I was working through a fantastic article from Kirk McElhearn in Macworld about finding files fast. He has a bunch of tips on how to make the most of both Spotlight and Finder. It's an excellent read and I highly recommend it.

With a plethora of tips available I realized that I really would not incorporate all of them into my daily usage. There was one tip however that jumped out at me as very helpful.

Using kind: in the search to find that pesky PDF file

Spotlight searches for a great many things; applications, documents, bookmarks, etc. This is both good and bad. Good in that it can find anything, bad in that it shows nearly everything. If you know that you want to find a specific class of file you can specify it using the "kind:" keyword.

As an example I have a PDF file that I've been referencing on and off lately. I don't want to throw it on my desktop and see it every day though, nor do I want to hunt for it in the Finder. Now I simply type "kind:pdf bgc" and the PDF file for the Boys and Girls Club that I need is right there. 

Finding that web site I visited a couple days ago

Another example is when I try to look for a site that I visited recently. I want to scan through my bookmarks history but given the volume of bookmarks that can take time. I was reading a great tutorial on building Ruby on Rails applications but could not remember the title or author's name and I didn't bother to bookmark it at the time. When did I visit that site? Two, three, four days ago? Scanning through my history just took too long.

By firing up Spotlight and entering "kind:history tutorial rails" the page I was looking for was in position 5 on the list. Without the "kind:history" filter I would never have seen it just typing "tutorial rails" into Spotlight. That alone is a huge time saver for me.

There are lots of different kind keywords that you can use. The ones I find valuable are bookmark, history, pdf, email and todo. You can get a complete list from Kirk's article.

Keeping Spotlight current

I mentioned before that Spotlight's index can become corrupt and gave a tip on how to fix it. If I had to pick out a single thing that will drive me away from using Spotlight it's that occasionally files cannot be found in the index and it needs to be rebuilt. Apple really needs to understand why this happens and fix it. I've thought about putting the reindex command into my nightly script but that likely won't help the problem since I don't know what action is corrupting the index in the first place.

On second thought, one thing I have noticed is that my index has become corrupt on my MacBook several times, yet my Mac Pro has not had that issue yet. I wonder if there's a correlation between putting the MacBook to sleep (closing the lid) and reopening it just a few seconds later while it's still writing the disk image? Hell, I'm not sure what could be causing it but something needs to be done by Apple about it.

Maybe it's time I give Quicksilver a second look.

Playing Media Rant - when will this get better?

So here's the deal. A buddy (Jeff) sends out some MPG files of a recent trip to friends. One of the friends responds that she cannot view the files on her Mac. Jeff sends a note to me on AIM:

Jeff: yo macboy

what app do you use to view MPG files

Nice to know that I am now "macboy". I feel like the Jive Lady in the movie Airplane... "Oh stewardess! I speak Mac".  I look at the MPG files that Jeff sends me and sure enough I can't view them. QuickTime Pro, which I recently upgraded to, gives me this:

I had already installed Flip4Mac into QuickTime but that didn't help me. A quick search turned up VLC, which I posted about earlier today. Finally, I could see the videos.

As a techie I am accepting of the challenges of technology. I understand why it all exists - that each vendor has their own way of recording the video that may take advantage of their hardware and hundreds of other issues. But when I put on my consumer hat I get more than a little pissed off that I have to go through so much crap just to watch a video that someone created.

If someone sends me an image file chances are I will be able to view it. It's going to be in JPG, GIF or PNG in all likelihood. My Mac, Windows and Linux machines will be able to view them easily right out of the box. Sure there are tons of file formats out there, but people have figured out that if you want the largest possible audience to view your files you need to put it in one of those formats.

When it comes to videos the options are staggering. At what point will we need to stop guessing which format will work best and have a standard, common format that everyone will be able to play reliably? Will this ever happen? Did I miss some piece of technology on the video side that makes this a non-issue?

YouTube got pretty damn close with their service, though I did have to install a Flash reader on each machine in order to view videos there.

Video recording technology is as pervasive as digital photography now. You can't buy a modern phone without getting a little video recorder built in and virtually every non-DSLR camera that comes out today has video capabilities. The need is clearly there to make it so that non-technical people can grab a file from any device and simply play it without having to download a bunch of stuff to make it work.

Somehow I don't think this is going to get better any time soon.

Windows vs Mac - can't we all just get along?

In the spring of 1992 I lived in Los Angeles, Ca. Not long after the riots commenced Rodney King, the man beaten by LAPD officers and the incident that proved the flash point for the riots, made the now famous plea "Can't we all just get along?"

It simply amazes me how people become so religious about a particular topic, especially the now painfully tired Windows vs Mac debate. Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages. I used to hate Mac - mainly because it was yet another platform I had to support as a developer. I would spend extraordinary amounts of time to craft a great application, only to have a vocal minority of the population complain that it wouldn't work on their Macs.

When that happened I did what any other normal, rational person would do. I ignored them. They didn't represent enough of a financial opportunity for me to even consider developing there.

The emergence of the web as an application platform nullified that debate to a large degree, at least for developers. It wasn't that long ago that commercial Windows developers were more consumed with variations of Windows installations (16 vs 32 bit, COM libraries, ComCtrl.dll versions, etc., etc). In the space of a few short years the web stopped being a high level presentation medium and became a platform for building very capable applications.

I know this - I built a successful business on the Windows client model and had to experience that painful transition to the web firsthand.

All of a sudden the developers that I knew stopped caring about Windows implementations and started worrying about HTML compliance, browser versions, JavaScript and DHTML. Just when my fellow Windows developers had mastered the Windows platform and had highly advanced tools to make it really easy to knock out killer applications, they became somewhat irrelevant.  Everyone I knew was telling me that client applications were dead and that it was all about the web as a platform.

It took me a really long time to accept this. It's because I'm stubborn and I had invested so much in Windows development already. I didn't want to take a huge step back and have to learn a whole new tool set. In the end I decided I'd better embrace the future and accept the web as a great model for building real applications, otherwise I may become a COBOL programmer waiting for a Y2K event to give me something to do.

Change is really friggin hard. Most people hate it and I'm like most people.

I tell you this because when I decided to look at the Mac as a personal computing solution I did so in part because I wanted to see what everyone was talking about. I had made the change from a custom client model to a web model and I guess it had broken down my resistance for exploring new technology.

As you may be able to tell from my other blog posts, I really like my Mac. That doesn't mean I hate Windows; I still use my XP machine every day. Doesn't mean I hate Linux; I have a wonderful little Ubuntu machine right behind me that I use occasionally.

Can a Mac get a virus? Sure it can - there just aren't any out there yet that I'm aware of. Trust me when I tell you that it is possible to build a virus for any programmable computer. It may not be able to wreak serious havoc and reproduce at will but it can do damage in other ways. Can a Windows machine get a virus? Sure it can - and you need to run anti-virus software OR be very aware of what you do in order to avoid them. Linux is in the same boat as Mac. These are simple facts.

That said, I'm going to go back to writing about the cool things I've discovered for my Mac. I'll also be writing about starting a technology business from scratch - something I'm doing again now. If you find this stuff interesting I encourage you to jump in and sign up for my RSS feed.

--David

Adventures in copying a CD

Well, I figured coping a CD would be a simple affair. I was wrong.

I had a Data CD that I needed to make a copy of. How hard can that be, right? Well, a buddy online said "just use Disk Utility". 

Cool - so I fired it up.

Now up to this point in time I've been really impressed with the UI on the Mac. Things just kind of worked. Yeah, they took a little getting used to but overall the usability on the machine is well thought out. Apparently an engineer more versed in 0s and 1s designed the UI for this.

You would think a simple button labeled - I don't know - perhaps "Copy" would be intuitive. 

Instead, in order to copy a disk you go into the "Restore" tab. From there you select the Source by dragging it into the Source area. Then you select the destination by dragging it into the Destination area. Only since the Source is also the destination (my MacBook only came with a single drive) it won't let me do that.

So I sat there for a while trying to figure out how the hell I was supposed to do it. Finally, in utter frustration I decided I'd Google teh Interwebs and see if I could find anything. My first hit gave me some decent instructions on how to accomplish the task; a blog entry from SmallDogs.com. Following that worked like a charm.

The next time the Mac dev team needs to think of an application to redo the interface on I highly recommend they take a hard look at Disk Utility. If there's a better way of doing this PLEASE make it more obvious.