TM drive and Migration Assistant

[Dave2002]

OK - I hear/see you. I'll come back when I've checked out what the system ACTUALLY does.

Hi Anastasius

OK - you win!

I used a script rather like this one:

COUNTER=0
echo >> TMfile.txt
echo New Run `date` >> TMfile.txt
while [ $COUNTER -lt 2400 ]; do
echo “The counter is” $COUNTER
echo "Before first write"
echo "Counter= " $COUNTER `date` >> TMfile.txt
echo "Before sleep"
sleep 60
let COUNTER=COUNTER+1
done
echo "ENDING"

and issued a "source scriptfile" command from within Terminal. Took a day or two to figure things out. One minor problem was that the command wasn't running all the time - it looks as though command line commands shut down if the CPU goes to sleep. The fix wasn't too difficult - set System Preferences -> Energy Saver so that the display sleeps, but the CPU never does. This gives a file with regular time stamps, and indeed it is possible to see that TM does save a copy every hour for the first 24 hours. Further back in time it does save one per day, but there's no guarantee which copy it'll save. This is useless for people who keep editing the same file and who may want to be able to get back to any version on any previous day, unless the applications themselves do backups, which some can do. Word can do that - though changes may be lost if files are passed between coworkers. Possibly TextEdit will do backups too.

Some people explicitly rename file copies regularly - which is what I do if I'm doing intensive work on a project - and the "obvious" thing to do is to append a date+time code to each edited and saved copy on any day. Then there's not much point in using TM anyway, other than to get a modicum of backtracking within a 24 hour period. TM won't give fine granularity once tomorrow arrives!

I think Unix systems have commands which are cleverer than this, and can recover any version from any day, but they may not work well with the kind of data and application files which are commonly used in MacOS X.

I think few people really understand what TM does in sufficient depth. It's better than nothing, but would be less useful for some projects than it might have been, though it is probably quite efficient with storage.

See also rcs and sccs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ntrol_software

[Anastasius]

Seriously though, I take my hat off to you for coming up with that script. I have done little programming ever since doing machine code way, way back when and I'm very impressed with what you've come up with. Is this Applescript or something else? I put your post up there with some of the best, my friend. Respect. So much excellent information.

I did also pop into TM to see from the RH side what the granularity was when you 'Enter TM'. There does seem to be a slightly strange anomaly for events in Yesterday. The granularity in terms of time chunks that you can step back with seems neither hourly as in Today or Daily.

I do have any idea that CarbonCopy Cloner archives changes. Maybe if it was setup to do backups on the hour then the archive might fill up with changes but I have no idea how easy it would be to restore individual files. I have a sense that it might be clunky. Your archive might also fill up with fils that change as part of normal use in the OS etc but I suspect one could set up a scheduled task that specifically just did Documents, iPhoto library...the things you want to keep track of.

Otherwise the best is, as we discussed, version control software.

[Dave2002]

That's pretty much bog standard Unix. Do you use Terminal at all? To run it, copy my text into TextEdit, and save the file somewhere where you know where it is. I created a directory on the desktop - called something like TMTestDir for this. Then invoke Terminal, and then navigate to the directory. A quick way is to issue a "cd" command without typing a return, then drag the icon from the desktop into the Terminal window, which puts the full file name of the directory in. Then just issue "source filename" with the name of the file you saved it as. Depending on the numbers used it'll run for a day or two.

I did wonder if I'd have to use Applescript. Also, I've not done much with Applescript, but it looks as though some Applescript examples actually just call Unix script files.

You probably know this, but you can modify my text to make it a bash or other shell script by an explicit mention on the first line, so it can run directly, but then you have to do a chmod command to make it executable. The source command does well enough in this case.

"sleep 60" in the code gives one minute granularity - probably too fine. "sleep 300" gives 5 minutes, and "sleep 600" gives 10 minutes, which is likely to be fine enough.

[Dave2002]

I'll add another TM related comment here. Today I actually found it helpful, as I tried to review some photos, and the default viewer application is Preview. A little while ago I discovered that Preview has some reasonably decent editing features for photos, and indeed I recently gave a talk about this as well as doing a demo of other software including the free Photoshop look alike GIMP. I do recall mentioning that sometimes Preview does destructive editing - overwriting the original file, even if the program itself is shut down or quitted. This seems to have happened with a photo I was looking at this afternoon, but fortunately it was easy enough to recover a copy of the original from TM - with the original time and date stamp.

Although I still recommend Preview for some simple editing (or even not quite so simple - it can do rather decent colour editing) photo editing tasks, it is really important to know that it may overwrite the original file without warning, so always take a copy before starting to view or edit. If files are Locked, then Preview will give a warning, and will not overwrite the original, and will ask you to make a copy or a duplicate. It should be possible to lock all the photo files in a directory, but it's not absolutely obvious how to do that. This link has some suggestions - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2234264?tstart=0 though I've not checked out the ideas or automated the process yet for my own purposes. In future I will try to ensure that all my photo files are locked, to avoid them being overwritten by accident within MacOS X.

[french frank]

In the event, Time Machine was used for the migration and was quick and (fingers crossed) okay. But Mavericks > El Capitan did make problems for Mail, which apparently has been common.

The Moving Finger of Apple Support guided me through various procedures for 40 minutes to fix it and I'm now keeping an eye out for any other nuisances - one being that clicking on Word 2016 in the dock brings up a whole load of templates when all I want is a blank word document. I've had to create a folder with a blank Word docx and blank Excel workbook. Don't know what would happen if I deleted all the templates except those two … .

[Anastasius]

Delighted it all went well for you, FF.

[french frank]

Delighted it all went well for you, FF.

Heh, heh - I think another session with Apple Support beckons. Mail again, I cannot fathom out why mail messages for some accounts are ending up in the junk folder. I just can't see how the settings differ from on my old Mac. You suggest it … I've done it.

[Anastasius]

It's probably due to a more rigorous Junk filter in your version of Mail cf. the previous version. I have mine switched off and use SpamSieve which is excellent.