Using Drobo and Drobo Share with Time Machine

Recently I have bought a Drobo and a Drobo Share. One of the reasons for this purchase was to be able to easily expand disk storage capabilities and have a central location to store Time Machine backups for both my Macs.

When I had installed my Drobo and Drobo Share I soon noticed that by default Time Machine does not allow NAS systems to be used as Time Machine backup disks. After a bit of research on the net I found that it is possible but it needs a little bit of work.

This blog post details the step I performed to setup Time Machine for my Macs

1) Setup your Drobo and Drobo Share and make sure everything is in working order and you have enough free space available to store Time Machine Backup data onto your Drobo.

2) For every Mac to be backup-ed using time machine create a sparse bundle image. You can create this disk image by using Disk Utility

Normally a volume size of twice the actual size of the HDD installed in your Mac should be adequate to store multiple versions of your files into the Time Machine backup. If you have enough storage in your Drobo you can make the disk image larger. After the sparse bundle has been created make sure to eject the disk image.

2) Copy the disk image to the root folder of your Drobo

3) Open a Terminal session and execute the following command on every Mac to be backup-ed by Time Machine

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

4) Start Time Machine and select you Drobo as Time Machine Disk. For for Time Machine to start, moste likely it will fail or just stop the prepare action as soon as it starts. If you now look at the contect of the root folder of your Drobo you will notice that one additional file is created. This file is named something like this

Atum_001debec863e.temp.sparsebundle

Atum in my case is the name of my MacBook Pro, and 001debec863e is an identifier used by Time Machine to identify the machine.

Use the first part of the name (Atum_001debec863e) to rename the temp.sparsebundle into its proper name for Time Macine. In my case that would be

Atum_001debec863e.sparsebundle.

4) As soon as Time Machine is done working you can click on the ‘Change Disk…’-button in the Time Machine preference pane and select None from the list.

5) You can now delete the xxx.temp.sparsebundle from your Drobo.

6) Now again you select your Drobo as a Time Machine Disk. This time there should be no errors and Time Machine will start backing up your Mac.

I have used to following resources from macosxhints.com while figuring out how to setup Time Machine in combination with my Drobo and Drobo Share
[1] – Create a Time Machine size limit for networked disks
[2] – Set up Time Machine on a NAS in three easy steps

Using Foxmarks to synch to iPhone/iPod Touch

For some time now I have been using Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks synchronized between several machines I am using. At first Foxmarks, as the name implies, was for Firefox only. About 3 months ago Foxmarks put out betas for both Internet Explorer (Windows only) and Safari (Mac only). The beta period is now over (February 2, 2009) and you can now download Foxmarks for the mentioned browsers from the Foxmarks site.

By just using the Foxmarks software you will be using the following synchronization setup



Since Foxmarks allows for synchronization with Safari, it is now also possible to synchronize your bookmarks with your iPhone or iPod Touch. For this you will need a MobileMe subscription. The synchronization setup will then look like this



On the Mac side you need to setup for Foxmarks and make sure the Foxmarks synching is running

and for MobileMe you have to enable the Bookmarks synchronization

On the iPhone/iPod Touch side you have to setup MobileMe synchronization (visit this page for detailed information on setting up MobileMe)

I have only had two issues with Foxmarks so far;

1. Dividers in Firefox sometimes get replaced with “———-”. Normally Foxmarks does a good job keeping dividers being dividers in Firefox
2. At some point in time I ended up with two ‘Unsorted Bookmarks’-folders

Both issues are easily solved and never resulted in loosing any of my bookmarks and I am almost certain it was caused due to me playing around with some settings (MobileMe and Foxmarks for Safari) on two machines.

I am only using the bookmark synchronization of Foxmarks, since I am using 1Password to keep my passwords save and secure.

Sharing a hotel WiFi connection over WiFi

For my daytime job I am spending a lot of time in hotels, which btw starts to suck big time. To be able to keep in touch with the rest of the family and do a bit of gaming I usually pay for 50 hours worth of WiFi access which last me through the whole month, well at least most of the time it does. Since I am also an avid iPhone user I turn on the roaming feature from time to time, which to no surprise results in a steep bill from T-Mobile.

So I started to think about this. So I am paying to have 50 hours of WiFi access and I pay T-Mobile for the roaming charges. I started to poke around in the System Preferences panel of my MacBook Pro. Like I suspected by default there is a possibility to share connections from one network card to another. Great.

Now I only needed to find me a nice little wifi router to become part of my standard traveling kit, which is starting to show more and more Apple logos. Quickly I laid my eyes on the AirPort Express. This little gadget was just what I was looking for, great form factor and the right price.

This sunday I was visiting the Media Markt in Rotterdam and I saw some of these beauties lying around. There were even some demo models at a discounted price (€80), so I just had to pick one up. And since my last to bills from T-Mobile both had around €80 of roaming charges, this was a no brainer. Since I had to go abroad the same day I could test the device almost immediately. Which is good since waiting to start playing with any gadget is not one of my strong points.

It turns out to extremely simple to create a private (or public) WiFi access point using the AirPort Express. It only took me two steps (excluding the normal setup of the AirPort Express, which to be honest I don’t for sure now is there is such a process, since mine had already been used to demo the unit). Anyways, here is what I had to do

1) Enable network sharing for your active network card. In my case I had to enable sharing from my built-in AirPort to the built-in ethernet card

    Enable ‘Internet Sharing’ and select the correct ‘From’ and ‘To’ network cards

2) Open up the AirPort Utility application and perform a manual setup for the AirPort Express to create a wireless network

    Press the ‘Manual Setup’ button

    Within the section ‘Wireless’ choose ‘Create a wireless network’, set a network name and provide security information

After these two simple steps I could whip out my iPhone and have it join the newly created wireless network.

Apple, thanks for making my life so easy!!

Tip: When you buy a demo model for any wireless device be sure to ask whether or not the store employees have specified a password for the device. In my case they did, luckily the password as written down in the instruction booklet of the AirPort Express.

Keeping my digital life in-sync (3)

This is the third installment of my quest to keep my digital life in-sync. In the second part about my quest I blogged about the use of Dropbox. In this post I am going a little deeper into some of the advantages I have come across on the internet.

I am using the application 1Password by Agile Web Solutions to keep track of all my username/password combinations used for the many websites I make use of. Up until a few days ago I used the Mac OS X Keychain synchronization of Mobile Me to synchronize the data between my two Macs. On the Agile Web Solutions Wiki I came across a page describing how you can use your Dropbox folder to store and synch the Agile keychain between your machines.

I have been using it for a couple of days now and so far it works very well, and feels a lot faster when data needs to be synchronized.

As soon as I heard of the existence of Things by Cultured code I installed on my Mac and am using it as my main application to track all the things I need to do or have done by a certain time. This worked very well but it became cumbersome when I bought a second Mac (a Mac Book Pro) and started traveling around. There was a way of manually copying certain files to a USB stick and constantly copy these files between the two Macs. This goes well for a certain amount of time, but eventually I forgot to do the copy trick and was stuck with two difference lists of things.

Method #1: The article Sync Your Things Database via Dropbox desrcibes how you can move the Things library to a different location and then create a symbolic link on the original location for the datafiles that links back to the new location. Read this article carefully, if you don’t feel comfortable using the Terminal use the next method.

Method #2: I was very pleased when I came across the following wiki page describing how Dropbox can be used store it at a location that can be synchronized between several machines. This method is easier then method #1

The only things you really need to be aware of is that you only have one copy of Things running on any machine and make sure synchronizing has been performed between the machines before using Things on the other machine.

Method #1 as described for synching the Things database can be used for other Mac applications as well (for those applications that not let you choose where their information is being stored, like with 1Password), so I am making a list of applications for which I want to keep the data synched between machines.

I am liking Dropbox more and more everyday.

Apple invasion

Few days ago a was just sitting behind my desk and looking at all the electronic equipement/gadgets I had sitting or lying around. After a bit of counting I was amazed to find out that I had over 9 products from one manufacturer. Even more amazing for me was the fact that it took only a little over two years for this invasion to unfold.

My life has been invaded by Apple Inc and unlike other invasions this does not give me a bad feeling on the contrary I feel quite good about it. Sure it cost me an arm and a leg to aquire all of these products, but every time I use these products it feels just right.

So what have I been collecting from Apple over the last

January 2, 2006: iPod Video 5th Gen 60GB
July 31, 2006: iMac 20″ (Model Early 2006)
November 20, 2006: Apple Mighty Mouse Wireless
March 3, 2007: Apple Wireless Keyboard
March-June 2007: iPod Shuffle 2nd Gen 1GB
February 7, 2008: iPod Touch 32Gb
July 15, 2008: iPhone 3G 16GB Black
June 28, 2008: MacBook Pro 17″ (Model Early 2008)
July 2008: Apple Remote

When I would include Apple’s software packages as well, the following items could be added

August x, 2007: iWork ‘08
August x, 2007: iLife ‘08
September 6, 2008: Mac OS X Leopard

It seems that I have been transformed into an Apple-addict… Ah well, it could have been worse ;)

Keeping my digital life in-sync (2)

Some months ago I wrote the post Keeping my digital life in-sync. At this moment I still haven’t found a good working solution to keep my bookmarks in-synch. This mainly concerns the bookmarks within (Mobile)Safari on my iPhone. FoxMarks does a pretty good job for anything bookmark related in Firefox, which is my preferred browser on all platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).

When it comes to being able to access the same documents from different machines I started to use Apple’s MobileMe by using its iDisk functionality. But for whatever reason it didn’t really work well for me.

Since the time I started using Macs I have been listening to the The Mac Geek Gab Podcast by Dave Hamilton & John F. Braun. For some time now I heard them mention Dropbox. So after hearing about their good experience with Dropbox I decided to give it a try.

At the time of writing I have installed Dropbox on four machines (two Macs and two Windows machine) and I like it! It has a nice feel to it, just by looking at the Dropbox folder I can see what the status of my files are (All done or still folders/files to be synched).

One thing that I have found that does not work (not sure that it should) is when you use Dropbox for folders that also contain hidden files. I have some folders that also have files that start with a dot, making the files invisible on Unix based platforms (Mac, Linux, etc.). When these files got synched to the Windows machine the files and folders where created but where visible. When synching between two Windows machines these attributes are also lost. So it is my guess that file and folder attributes are just always lost.

For not a real big issue but I can imagine that for others it is a big deal, so let’s hope Dropbox will find a way of fixing this issue cross platform.

You can get Dropbox for free including free 2.0GB of storage, which if needed can be upgrade to 50GB for $9.99 per month or $99 yearly.

One important note when using the free version of Dropbox. If your account has been inactive for a period of 90 days Dropbox may delete any or all of your files. This is done without prior notice.
Just so you know…

Keeping my digital life in-sync

In the wake of my new iPhone I am working on making the efforts needed to keep information synced between the several devices I am using easier. Currently I am using at least 4 devices, being;

• an iPod, soon to be replaced with an iPhone depending on the speed of both Apple and T-Mobile
• an iMac
• a MacBook Pro
• a regular laptop running the Windows OS for work

The information I am currently most concerned about keeping in sync are;

• Contact information
• Calendar information
• Bookmarks
• News feeds

Contact and Calendar information
This one I have solved by buying myself a MobileMe subscription from Apple. Despite all of the negative responses revolving around the Push not being a real push and numerous outages around the world, I find myself among the lucky ones. So far I have no real issues when using MobileMe. I had however some issues with the iPod Touch initially, it would sync over the complete calendar down to the iPod regardless of what settings I was using. After some fiddling with the settings I found what was working for me

• Set the iPod Touch up for manually syncing
• Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to off
• Fetch mode to ‘Manually’
• Open the Calendar application and wait for it to (first clear and then) receive all of your data
• Set the iPod Touch up for Push
• Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to On
• Fetch mode to ‘Every 15 minutes’

Bookmarks
Since I mainly use Firefox for my internet browsing, keeping my bookmarks in-sync could be easily achieved by using the brilliant addon named Foxmarks (see also one of my earlier posts). The only downside is that Firefox is not running on the iPod Touch or iPhone. This means that I don’t have direct access to my bookmarks when I am on the road. I could be using Foxmarks website to access my bookmarks, but I would much rather have a way of syncing my Firefox bookmarks into Safari.

This is something I still need to figure out.

News feeds
For getting the latest news from several web sites around the world I have been using NewsFire on my Mac OS X based machines. This has always worked fine for me, but since the introduction of the new software version for both the iPod Touch and iPhone combined with the introduction of the iTunes App Store a whole new world of abilities has been opened for these two devices (unless you had jail broken your device, then you had access to third-party apps for quite some time already).

On the iTunes App Store I found the application NetNewsWire (the link will take you to the iTunes App Store), which is a RSS news feed reader. I already knew this application as a regular Mac OS X application, but I had never really looked at it since I liked NewsFire and was not looking for a replacement for it.
With the possibility of running NetNewsWire on the iPod Touch this has totally changed. So yesterday NetNewsWire has replaced NewsFire on both my Macs and has been installed on my iPod Touch.
The synching of the RSS feeds is handled by using the services of NewsGator. Just sign up for a free account and your are pretty much set.

NewsGator also provides toolbar applications for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but since these are provided as a downloadable executable, these are unusable on a Mac. I have found another way which allows you to add news feeds to your NewsGator account without the need of an addon or applications. I will describe this in a separate post.

iPhone 16GB

After some fighting with myself I decided to go for it. Wow, I managed to delay my urge to order it for a full 4 days, partially achieved by being out of the country since Friday but still, I resisted the urge to line-up at midnight.

So far for trying to make me feel a bit better of chunking out a decent amount of cash to satisfy my need to new technologies.

Since T-Mobile is currently out of stock on iPhone 3Gs it could take up to 6 weeks before I can hold that little gem in my hands. So for now I have update my iPod Touch to firmware version 2.0 so I can enjoy the new applications, already found some nice ones that are now on my list to be tested as soon I get my iPhone.