The Mac Chronicles
Books
I have a large library.
Frankly, what I have is a control problem in bookstores, but there are worse problems to have.
There’s a magical point in the book acquisition phenomenon where you truly can’t remember what you own. Therefore, when presented with a bargain on something at a used bookstore, you pounce, only to discover upon your return home that you owned the book already. Quite embarrassing.
To avoid this, I’ve tried cataloging my books in the past, but it’s just been too much data entry.
However, once again, the Mac provides a fantastic solution to the problem.
Books is a personal library catalog application. The beauty of Books is an extensible plugin architecture which has been leveraged to pull catalog information from what seems to be every possible online repository. Thus, by just entering minimal title information, complete canonical information about a book can be pulled automagically from a source like Amazon. If possible, Books even pulls in an image of the cover, which makes searching on the bookshelf that much easier.
Export plugins produce output for iPod notes, Palm organizers, PDF, and more. With a little effort, this should address my duplication problem.
Books is free and open-source.
iPhoto Sharing
OS X comes with iPhoto, a much better photo management application than anything we had on the old PC. iPhoto has a very intuitive interface; moving our photo library over was a trivial task. Furthermore, it immediately understood what to do with our camera as soon as we plugged in the USB.
However, by default, iPhoto imports pictures into the personal library of the user running iPhoto. This wasn’t the way we wanted iPhoto to work; rather, we wanted to share the same library, with full access control, no matter which account was in use.
The definitive and most workable approach to this problem uses a shared directory and access control lists, and is outlined at macOSXhints:
10.4: Share an iPhoto library among multiple users
Finally, to keep the ‘Pictures’ quickpick in the finder view looking normal, I followed the following tip, also from macOSXhints, to link each account’s iPhoto Library folder to the new shared folder:
Share an iPhoto4 Library between two or more users
This all works as desired. Each account sees the shared library and has full access control to it; iPhoto itself will disallow other instances of iPhoto to run under another account simultaneously, so data integrity is assured.
Free Software Directories
A couple of directories listing free software for the Mac:
Some great stuff here.
SuperDuper!
I classify backups into three categories:
- Bootable full backup
- Local backup of user files
- Offsite backup of user files
I was doing a decent job of the two user file backups under Windows, but the bootable full backup was a different story.
I used Norton Ghost to back up my Windows main drive to a backup drive. The version of Ghost I was using didn’t do hot backups while the system was live; rather, it took the system down to a custom DOS program while the backup ran. And ran. And ran.
The thing took forever, and the system was unusable during the multi-hour process. As a result, I seldom did full backups like this. It was fortunate that the main drive was a RAID, since my backups were always out of date.
I resolved to do a better job on the shiny new Mac Pro. Given my past experience, it was evident to me that I needed a backup utility that:
- produced bootable full backups
- ran in a reasonable amount of time
- was completely reliable
- could run while the system was up
- could be automated, so it could be used every day
Requirements in hand; off to Google for some research. Some poking around revealed two excellent posts on the plasticsfuture blog:
These are both epic posts, with excellent commentary. You could spend days following up on all the pointers provided therein, and I did — I must have tested nearly every backup product available.
And, as with many others, I settled on SuperDuper! as my weapon of choice. It’s simple, fast, reliable, produces bootable hot backups, and can be scheduled to run automatically. The vendor provides a free version which will, under manual control, clone a drive; one couldn’t ask for a much better trial than this. For $27.95 USD, scheduling, incremental backups, and other features are unlocked.
My system now performs an incremental bootable clone every morning at 3 am, without intervention, utterly reliably, in very little time, for about one-third the cost of a comparable Windows cloning utility.
I’m really starting to love this platform.