BigDiver

There are many situations that require you to restore backups to different computers, other than the one from where the data was originally backed up from. In the case of Apple’s Time Machine the restore procedure to different machines is not very intuitive. You have to use the “secret” option key…

There is a supported way to restore Time Machine backups of other computers using the “option-key” click on the Time Machine menu. If you want to use it just do the following:

1. Connect the Time Machine disk to the Mac you want to restore the files to
2. Set the “Show time machine status in the menu bar” In System Preferences -> Time Machine.
3. Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and keeping the mouse button pressed, press the “Option” key.
4. Select “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”
5. Select the disk you want
6. click Use Selected Disk

The Time Machine will open with the selected disk and you can use it to restore the files.

If, like me, you are using a non supported Time Machine configuration, where the backup disk is mounted using SMB or AFP (see this post on how to enable that) then the procedure above will not work directly. In my case I backup to my Buffalo TeraStation NAS, and the “Browse Other Time Machine Disks” window shows up empty, with no disk to select.

In order for this to work you need to first mount the Time Machine disk by hand in using the command line.

1. Mount the shared folder where your Time Machine backups are stored
2. Open a Terminal window and cd to the Time Machine volume. in my case I called it backups

   sudo cd /Volumes/backups

3. use hdiutil to mount the specific Time Machine .sparsebundle file

   sudo hdiutil attach <time_machine_file.sparsebundle>

Now you should be able to see the mounted volume in Finder, with all the backups listed as folders, and you can copy any files directly from it. Remember that mounting the disk may take some time due to the size of the disk and network connection speed, especially If you do this over a WiFi network.

Another option is to repeat the supported Time Machine procedure  outlined in the beginning of this post. You should now see the mounted disk as a Time Machine disk. Select the the disk and click “Use Selected Disk” and Time Machine will open on the selected disk just like with a Time Machine supported back up disk.

Personally I like to copy them directly from the Finder but your preference may vary so I document both ways of achieving this goal. Hope this helps.

Hi I feel that this  a prety common request: Bind the Home/End keys to move to the beginning and end of lines respectively.

In Mac OS X (10.5 and 10.6) some applications use the Cmd-Rigt and Cmd-Left to perform these actions but, call me old fashioned, I like to use Home and End instead.

It is actually very easy to change the Cocoa Key bindings for any user under Mac OS. Just follow these steps:

1. Create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict in ~/Library/KeyBindings directory

   mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings
   cd ~/Library/KeyBindings
   touch DefaultKeyBinding.dict

2. Edit your DefaultKeyBinding.dict file so it contains:

   {
   /* home */
   "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
   "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* Cmd-Left */
   "@\UF702"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
   "$@\UF702" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* Cmd-Right */
   "@\UF703"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
   "$@\UF703" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* end */
   "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
   "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* page up/down */
   "\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
   "\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";
   }

3. Restart the Cocoa Application.

This example works very well with TextMate.

In order to bind other keys you need to find their Scan code, and you can use the following modifiers
For more information please check this article

After having done the Snow Leopard upgrade from leopard 10.5.8 a week ago, I have to say I am disappointed!

A lot of my applications just crash, Xcode and Mac Ports had to be reinstalled, Apache and PHP reconfigured by hand, reinstall MySQL, among others.

I have yet to see any real performance improvements, for example the Terminal application is very slow (over 10s) to give me a prompt.

I did get some 10Gb back from my HDD but… I am considering doing a fresh install. Am I back on Windows?

very sad…

I have to say that my experience upgrading both my Macs to Snow Leopard has been mixed. It was easy as clicking the Install button on the iMac, it was a nightmare on the Macbook Air.

First I used the Remote CD installation process, started the Macbook Air, mounted the remote CD from the iMac and proceeded to run the “Install Mac OSX.app”. After agreeing to the license agreement the installation utility told me that the disk did not have enough free space. Despite the fact that the disk had 21Gb of free space!

After some digging I found out that PGP Whole Disk Encryption is not compatible with Snow Leopard, and PGP advised users to decrypt the disk before upgrading.

So I decrypted the disk and restarted the Installation process, only to find out a new error! Damn.

The install app now told me that the Machintosh HD, the only disk, in my Macbook Air, was not a bootable disk and could not install to it. I did some more web searching and some people reported the error to related to the partition format, not being GUID.

I checked with Disk Util and it was indeed GUID. So using Disk Util I added a new partition with 1Gb, using the free space, this procedure rewrote the new partition table to disk and after I was able to finally install Snow Leopard.
When Snow Leopard was installed I used Disk Util again to delete the 1Gb partition and recover the disk space.

If Disk Utility gives you disk verification errors, you need to repair those before resizing your partitions. If you repair the disk multiple times and it still gives you the same errors then you should run the Remote Install Mac OS X application on another Mac. If you only have a Windows as a second computer check this the “How to use Remote Disc” article on Apple’s support site.

Boot your MacBook Air directly into the Snow Leopard CD. Just start the Air and hold the option key until you see the list of disks you have to boot from. If the Remote Install Mac OS X application is running on your other computer the Snow Leopard will show up here.

Have you had Snow Leopard upgrade issues?