Brian Toth

My First Time Machine Restore

After failing to get iDefrag to defragment my 500GB hard drive, I tried doing a Time Machine restore to accomplish the same thing. (I wish I had thought of that before spending the $30 on iDefrag.)

First, I made sure that I wasn’t excluding anything from my backups, like my VMWare virtual machines, etc. And then I did two backups, just to be 100% sure that my backups were current.

I booted from my OS X 10.6 DVD and did the restore from my latest backup. I let it run overnight, but it estimated it was going to take about 4.5 hours. This was for about 470GB of data.

Everything seems to be OK. iDefrag’s display shows that my data is 100% defragmented and everything is nicely compacted together. However, the Finder is showing that I now have 14GB more free space on my drive! I realize that Time Machine doesn’t backup logs and caches and other hidden Unix files I probably won’t miss. Also, defragmenting can increase free space… but 14GB!? I’m afraid I’ll find out one day were all that data went, and I won’t be happy.

If anyone has an explanation for this, please contact me or send me message on Twitter (@briantoth), I’d like to know what’s going on.

Please Update Your Bookmarks

I’m moving my self-hosted Wordpress blog over to Tumblr since I’m trying to lighten my maintenance load. Please update your bookmarks, feed readers, etc. to the new URL: http://blog.briantoth.com.

All of the existing posts have been moved over to the new site, though I didn’t take the time to try to maintain all the permanent links to individual posts. Where possible I’ve at least tried to link to the corresponding day or month of the post you’re looking for.

For those readers that might be trying to make the same move I did, I’ll be documenting my steps to make the transition. Writing the code to transfer the posts was actually fun and if I felt there was a market for it, I would probably clean up the code and make it much more functional.

If You’re Experiencing Problems…

… after installing the latest Google Maps Plugin update, uninstall the old version:

/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/BTGoogleMaps.bundle
/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/BTGoogleEarth.bundle
/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/BTGoogleDirections.bundle
/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/BTGooglePreferences.bundle
/Library/Frameworks/GoogleMapsShared.framework

As per the last news post, this upgrade is only necessary if you use Address Book in 32-bit mode in Snow Leopard. It does not add any new features or fixes.

For the Plugin users coming from MacUpdate or VersionTracker: I don’t read those sites at all. I don’t update the content on those sites, they post the updates themselves (whether I’d like them to or not). Please don’t leave comments on MacUpdate and VersionTracker with support questions, I will not answer them there. Thanks.

Google Maps Plugin Updated

Fixed a bug with Snow Leopard users running Address Book in 32-bit mode.

Also, ditched the Apple Installer package for my custom installer that I use with PostCheck. It simply moves the plugins and the required framework to your personal Library folder. If you used the previous installer and installed for All Users… uninstall the previous version first or it won’t work.

If you don’t run Address Book in 32-bit mode in Snow Leopard, you don’t need to upgrade, nothing else is new.

PostCheck 1.9.2

PostCheck 1.9.2 fixes a bug with saving certain preferences. I’ve also whipped up a custom installer. Apple’s installer is too picky about permissions and authorization and not very suitable for a simple install-in-home-folder situation. If you’ve previously installed PostCheck for all users of your computer, you can either manually install the plugin in the Address Book Plug-Ins folder, or remove the shared plugin and install this new version in your personal Library.

Apple Installer Problems

I’ve tracked down a few problems since my move to using Apple’s Installer. If you have problems please let me know. I’m currently debating between a compromise with Apple’s Installer vs. going back to my own custom installers for the plugins. Neither is exactly what I want.

Google Maps Plugin 2.7

I just posted my first update to the Google Maps Plugin in over two years! Version 2.7 supports Snow Leopard in 64-bit. Unfortunately, it drops support for 10.3.9, but Panther users can still download the previous 2.6.3 version. I’ve also replaced my home-built installer with a proper Apple installer package. Let me know if something doesn’t work as expected.

PostCheck 1.9.1

PostCheck 1.9.1 is available. It doesn’t add any new features or fix anything. But this version will run OS X 10.4 or higher and is both 32 and 64-bit compatible. Now I don’t need to maintain two separate downloads. I’ve also ditched my custom installer script in favor of using Apple’s PackageMaker to make a proper installer for the plugin. The installer still installs into your Home folder, so if you’d like it to be available for everyone that uses your computer, you’ll need to manually move the plugin from [Your Home]/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins/PostCheck.bundle to /Library/Address Book Plug-Ins.