Chris Barr

So, Photoshop crashed on me.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

I hope this helps the nice people over at Adobe.

Foxmarks

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Just wanted to give a quick plug to of of my new favorite products, Foxmarks.  Foxmarks is a great little online service and browser plugin to synchronize your bookmarks between computers.  I rely on this between my computer at home and my work computer.  If I see something at work that I want to look at later, I simply bookmark it and forgot about it.  When I get home, I have it already in my bookmarks bar.  They also have a pretty nifty web interface so you can access you bookmarks from anywhere without installing software.

So if you want to try it out, download the Firefox Plugin, create an account and start backing up and syncing your bookmarks.  If you’re not a Firefox user (and you’re not afraid of alpha or beta release software) there’s a version for IE and a version for Safari as well.  The Safari syncing really comes in handy for iPhone users since your iPhone bookmarks are synced from Safari.

I’ve just now installed the Safari plugin and everything seems to be working great so far.  Let me know what you think, leave a comment!

Restoring from a Time Machine Backup

Saturday, January 24, 2009

It's usually a good idea to wipe off your hard drive and start fresh once every year or so, regardless of what OS you run. In the past it's been a thing I've dreaded mostly due to the huge time commitment involved. My process before was to:

1. Make sure all important files were backed up (1 hour minimum)
2. Wipe the hard drive and re-install OS X (1-2 hours)
3. Reboot and install OS updates (~30 minutes)
4. Copy all the backed up file back onto the machine (~1 hour)
5. Install all software needed from installation disks and the web (3-4 hours No thanks to Creative Suite...)

Needless to say, that's pretty much an all day event. It involved so many steps that were spaced out just enough so that you couldn't really leave and get anything done. It can also cause a lot of mental stress because you're always worried with "Did I remember to back up my _____???" In the end, it was worth it though, I got rid of all kinds of junk that had built up and I ended up with a faster machine that's no longer bogged down.

Enter Time Machine. I began to use this last year and haven't looked back yet. For those that don't yet know, Time Machine is Apple's brilliant and easy backup solutions. You just designate another hard drive for backups, and once an hour it makes a copy of all the files that have changed. Because of this I have pretty much everything I've worked on since the beginning of 2008 - and multiples copies of it.

For those curious, I choose to trust my data with a Drobo, which is like RAID for dummies. I've got two redundant 1 Terabyte drives - I feel my data is safe.

One of the best new features in OS X was the ability to use that Time Machine backup as a way to restore your computer to a previous state. This is perfect for you if your hard drive crashes, or even if you're having problems. My initial thought was that if I was having problems, wouldn't restoring from Time Machine just restore the problems as well? In short, no. Time Machine only backs up your user data, no system files are backed up and noting that can be re-generated will be backed up (things like caches and your spotlight index).

Recently my Macbook Pro was feeling pretty sluggish. Videos didn't play smoothly, applications took forever to load, and importing and browsing through my photos in iPhoto was painfully slow. It was time for a clean start. Lucky for me, Time Machine removes the majority of the steps I listed above. Basically all that needs to be done now is:

1. Wipe the drive, install OS X
2. Restore from Time Machine
3. Install OS updates

Now this isn't a quick process, but it's no longer a thought intensive, worrisome, all day process. So if you're in a similar situation to mine and you're already using Time Machine, lets get started! Follow the jump to read more.