Tag Archives: Mac

WTF, Time Machine?

For a while I was feeling pretty good about making the switch from whenever-I-get-around-to-doing-it backups with SuperDuper to hourly-in-the-background backups with Time Machine. But today I noticed that, even after more than a week, no history shows up when I attempt to “time travel”. Then I find TS1760: “In the Mac OS X 10.5 Time …

December 16, 2008 – 2:44 am | By Benjamin | Posted in Nerdery | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Time Machine automatically finds your sparse image

Yesterday I followed Erik J. Barzeski’s instructions to configure Time Machine to backup to a sparse bundle disk image on my Drobo. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell Time Machine to use the disk image and not the whole disk; eventually I discovered that if you just select …

December 8, 2008 – 12:12 pm | By Benjamin | Posted in Nerdery | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Creating a RAM disk on Mac OS X

Here is a pair of shell functions to create and destroy a RAM disk on Mac OS X. # Creates a RAM disk device, formats it as HFS+, then mounts it. # parameters: size in megabytes create_ram_disk() { local RAMDISK_SIZE_MB=$1 local RAMDISK_SECTORS=$((2048 * $RAMDISK_SIZE_MB)) RAMDISK_DEVICE=`hdiutil attach -nomount ram://$RAMDISK_SECTORS` RAMDISK_PATH=`mktemp -d /tmp/ramdisk.XXXXXX` newfs_hfs $RAMDISK_DEVICE # format as …

September 12, 2008 – 2:44 pm | By Benjamin | Posted in Nerdery | Tagged , | Comments Off