mac and iphone question...

[rmd]

osx 10.5, leopard: worth the upgrade? should i wait for whatever's next? does 'time machine' work as it should? can i use that with any old external hard drive? how about to a drive mounted with nfs?

iphone extended care warranty: i assume it's worth it. any reason not to?

thanks, people of the livejournal!

Comments

[solarbird]

I am relying on Time Machine right now to save me from HD death. My friend Kirby also had to rely on it for the same reason and reported FLAWLESS VICTORY so I am hoping for the same. Fingers crossed and all that.

I like 10.5 quite a bit. I'm back on 10.4 for the moment because of said dead HD and I am missing Spaces (multidesktop) ALL THE DAMN TIME. Also Time Machine and some other stuff.

[bryant]

Time Machine just saved me from HD death. Excellent backup system.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

what's your time machine destination? i'm still using rsync to the old bsd box, it was an odd form of recovery i guess but it worked ok. that said, i realize there's reasons people develop new technologies :)

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I think that Leopard is worth it, especially as it's now fairly stable (the release was shockingly bad).

Time Machine is a great backup tool but don't expect it to work reliably over a network (it's likely better with a machine which is less likely to randomly drop off the network than a laptop). When you back up over a network, it creates its own disk image whose filesystem it writes to, which is quite a bit more fragile than using a remote filesystem protocol. My experience doing backups over our wireless network was that it seemed great at first until it started showing mysterious errors saying it couldn't do the backup. Some of them I couldn't correct with Disk Utility/fsck. Now I just plugin an external hard drive whenever I want to do backups... which obviates the utility of Time Machine somewhat but is still effective. Given that you can pick up a 1TB external drive for $100 or less with a little shopping, it's not a big deal to have a drive handy.

I get Applecare for most of my Apple portables. I had to get service on both my original iPhone and current one (but during the original 1 year warranty). Because I'm so far from an Apple Store, Applecare is extra worthwhile to me as Apple won't even talk to me on the phone to arrange a warranty repair after the first 90 days. If I were in Boston I could just trot over to an Apple Store.

Never pay list for Applecare. Amazon usually carries Applecare for 10 to 20% off list (http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26x%3D0%26ref%255F%3Dnb%255Fss%255Fgw%26y%3D0%26field-keywords%3Dapplecare%26url%3Dsearch-alias%253Daps&tag=dotdr-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957), and you can often find better prices than that if you search around a bit or are willing to trust someone on ebay.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I love Spaces. I have the same problem when I'm on a Windows machine; I miss Spaces and Expose.

[solarbird]

I have an external hard drive hooked up to my old G4 laptop with the dead screen but which otherwise works fine and so now serves as our time machine backup server.

[solarbird]

Interesting - I'm backing up over a network (to my old G4) from a laptop and it seems okay. Yeah, it gets interrupted occasionally, but it recovers from that pretty cleanly in my experience.

[pir.livejournal.com]

(pointed here by catness)

10.5 is worth the upgrade from 10.4 or previous, in my opinion. In it's early days it was kinda flaky (as osx releases tend to be) but it's matured and the new features like Spaces, quick preview on things (select a file in finder and hit space, you'll get a floating "window" with a preview of the file) and lots of other odds and ends are useful to me.

10.6 will likely be released this quarter but again with the flakiness of new osx releases I won't be running it for some time to come.

I'll prefix my comments about Time Machine with the fact that I don't use it personally so all this is 2nd hand but I know quite a few geeks who use it.
IIRC the external drive has to be formatted with HFS+ and may need to be reformatted on a 10.5 box if it's a too old format version. Officially you can only do it on remote devices if they are exported from an OSX server box or time capsule but there is a "full speed ahead and damn the torpedos" setting under the hood to enable it to other things. I don't details about over NFS but apparently it can be done; http://rajeev.name/blog/2007/11/03/time-machine-with-smb-and-nfs-shares/

I usually get long warranties on anything valuable I carry around because it's likely I'll break it.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I was backing up to a drive on a Mini over AFP.

After a couple of those failures I decided I just didn't trust over-network Time Machine backups anymore.

Apple does support Time Machine over the network to their "Time Capsule", so doing this isn't completely unsupported.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

One more thing -

If you buy Leopard, you also don't need to pay list - Amazon carries it for about $23 off (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FK88JK?ie=UTF8&tag=dotdr-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000FK88JK).

And Apple has just started selling the Mac Box Set (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AMLPYM?ie=UTF8&tag=dotdr-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001AMLPYM), which is Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09. I don't use much of iLife, just iPhoto, but the new iPhoto has some nice face recognition features. I've been using iWork and have been pretty happy with it. Amazon sells the box set for the regular list price of Leopard.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

Except warranties don't cover user damage...

But portables always seem more likely to have manufacturer defects, too...

[pir.livejournal.com]

More accurately I'll be rougher with it and that shows up faults a lot faster. Sometimes when I do damage things they'll fix them anyway, depends what it looks like...

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

One heads-up about Spaces. Unlike Every Other Virtual Desktop System EVER, an NxM grid of desktops does NOT have top->bottom or left->right looping.
This is being worked on by a 3rd party (as part of the 1.1 version of Hyperspaces), but it drives me NUTS every day.

Also, I really wish Apple had some way to deal with dialog boxes from the keyboard, all the time, consistently, but that's not a 10.5 thing.

Beyond that, I like 10.5 a great deal.

[firni.livejournal.com]

If you're on Macheist, you can get this thing for Spaces called "Hyperspaces" for free.

I downloaded but can't use it yet because I'm still running 10.4. P has 10.5 on his new laptop, of course, the bastard.

[dfjdejulio.livejournal.com]

Do Not trust any network disk for Time Machine unless it's one explicitly supported by Apple. There's features related to the timing of operations and their responses that don't behave consistently with network drives, but do with the drives and protocols that Apple explicitly supports. If you only use either local or Apple-supported network data stores, you should be safe, but if you use non-supported network data stores, there is a chance that a network traffic screwup can corrupt your backup.

As for iPhone, only reason I can see to maybe not get AppleCare for it is if you want to jailbreak it. Sometimes their answer to support questions will be "first, before anything else, upgrade to the latest firmware", and that can screw you if you're jailbroken. (I won't jailbreak mine, so this doesn't apply to me.)

[cz_unit]

I hate the management of it; everything that I have used for years is missing. I prefer 10.4.

However everything requires it. Also note: If you go to 10.5.6 apple has broken the USB support so it's harder to jail break your iphone.

[cz_unit]

That's true. Iphoto is amazingly impressive. It's a bit slow on my 500mhz cube, but it runs well. Just give it time to do the initial import/conversion.

CZ

[rmd.livejournal.com]

hm. i'm new to the platform as of 10.4, and i'm using it as a plain old vanilla user (modulo occasional use of CLI things like "tcpdump"), so i'm not sure i'd miss much. anything in particular that's missing that might be visible up here at the surface of the pond, as it were?

i haven't bricked jailbroken my iphone, so i'm not concerned about that so much.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

bastard!

[rmd.livejournal.com]

wacky -- they don't seem to have iphone applecare.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

We're using the hard drive out of mom's old iMac in an enclosure for her Time Machine disk, it seems to be working fine. 10.5 looks pretty cool but I probably wouldn't have upgraded except for the fact that we bought the upgrade a couple of months ago for mom's old iMac, which then died last month, so she has a brand new machine and the install from the disks isn't on anything, so now it's mine. And I still haven't gotten around to actually doing it yet...

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Also extended warranty: always worth it on apple stuff in my book. I say this as a pretty devoted apple customer, too. But I have encountered so much hardware fail over the years.

Time Machine

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[cz_unit]

breaking the phones doesn't seem to be that big of a deal; if they get bricked it looks like they can be cold-reloaded. I'd do my Touch, but it's got new loaders that are a lot harder to crack. Maybe this weekend.

That said, I run my macs as servers. And the startup scripts I use don't seem to work on 10.5. Neither does netinfo it looks like, which means I have a problem authenticating to the 20 year old NeXTStation domain master here at the house.

CZ

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I think 10.5 is a very nice improvement over 10.4. I don't use Spaces or Expose much, but the increase in speed of Spotlight turns it into something very handy indeed. (If you don't like Spotlight, investigate QuickSilver and LaunchBar.)

Time Machine is good because of the history aspect as much as anything else. You can walk down the changes to your filesystem as you're hunting for something, which can mean retrieving a document before it has become corrupted and then backed up. It isn't quite a bootable backup, but it can be recovered from very easy via the 10.5 install disc. If you do want a bootable backup clone, both SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner can create a bootable clone that can also be used as a incremental backup device through file synchronization.

A lot of things do require 10.5 to be fully functional, including OmniFocus, so that's a good reason there for you. Apple put in a lot of under the hood work into 10.5. Not as much as they're purportedly doing for 10.6, but I think it makes for a lot of little improvements that on the whole add up to something much nicer than is 10.4. (Which I didn't have a problem with before 10.5, and still use it in some instances, but, really, 10.5 is better.)

The Time Capsule and new Airport Extreme Base Stations have either internal or USB connectible hard drive access that works well with Time Machine. Time Machine does need to be formatted HFS+ (and possible journaled as well, but I'm not sure on that) but if you hook up a drive to the machine, or mount a Time Capsule or other AFP mountable volume, Time Machine will ask if you want it to start using it, and it will go ahead and do everything you need it to do. The Time Capsules are nice, because they allow multiple users to use them and the backup is done as a disk image.

I do think that AppleCare is indeed especially useful for portable devices. Solidstate critters like the iPhone, maybe not quite so much, but it can be nice to have if you do end up needing it.