Friday, April 17. 2009
Mac: SuperDuper to the Rescue
| Of late, my MacBookPro has been going slower and slower, to the point of being almost unusable due to severe and continual disk swapping (the ever-dreaded beachball effect). It seems (despite what various pundits say) that my disk was severely fragmented - despite having close to 30 GB free, my machine would often churn for minutes (sometimes up to 10 mins) at a time, due to the lack of contiguous free space (it should be noted that I do a lot of Photoshop editing with fairly large RAW files). I didn't want to necessarily do a fresh install, since I have some built from scratch applications (i.e. KDE window system among them) which would be a pain to rebuild again, so enter SuperDuper! Backup tool. I have written about the SuperDuper! Backup tool previously, but have never used it in a restore before  . Of course, as long as one is going to do a backup and restore, you may as well restore to a bigger disk as well (so I purchased a Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black with Free Fall Sensor SATA 7200 RPM). The only other hitch is that with the 17" Mac Book Pro, it seems that Apple tried to make it painful to swap out the drive, requiring 30 screws (?!) as well as a T-6 Torque wrench. Fortunately, there are a number of guides around the internet detailing the disassembly procedure (iFixIt and ExtremeTech to name a few).Also, luckily for me, I had the extremely nimble fingers of my co-worker as well.  Just to be on the safe side I made sure that I had backed up my Address Book, Little Snitch FW rules, Adium ChatLogs and 1Password entries (as it turns out below, it was a good thing that I did. The restore took approximately 4.5 hours (for 135GB of data) and the only hitches I ran into were: • Permissions issue with Spotlight • Verify that Backblaze had the new drive set for backup • Had to restore Little Snitch rules from a recent backup (fortunately made one right before the disk swap )• Error in my Adium Chatlogs rsync script, but that is my issue Both the Backblaze and Little Snitch glitches were pretty straightforward to correct. The Spotlight one took slightly longer to track down (wasn't the usual issues with the prefs file that usually cause Spotlight to stop indexing). These were the permissions immediately after the restore: colleen-velos-computer-2:/ colleenvelo$ ls -ald /.Spotlight-V100 drw------- 8 root colleenv 272 Apr 17 17:32 /.Spotlight-V100 I corrected the permissions, and after a reboot, Spotlight started indexing again: colleen-velos-computer-2:/ colleenvelo$ ls -ald /.Spotlight-V100 drwx------ 8 root colleenv 272 Apr 17 17:32 /.Spotlight-V100 at any rate, after the above permissions correction, I could once again get a correct status on the Spotlight status (without getting an error): colleen-velos-computer-2:/Volumes colleenvelo$ sudo mdutil -s "Macintosh HD" Macintosh HD: Status: Indexing Enabled I suspect the above issue has something to do with SuperDuper! putting the Spotlight in read-only mode (probably to ensure db consistency, I suspect). (fyi: for those interested in the gory HFS file system details, there is handy command-line debug tool, hfsdebug, which shows interesting info regarding an HFS file system. Also, this is a nice article on usage). |  |
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