Saving Mail and Other Program Data

[Charles Martin]

> From: Al Poulin <alpoulin at cox.net>
> Excellent rant!  Thank you Charles.  It helped tip my thinking toward 
> what
> Mike, Alex, Randy, and Kirk were saying.

They are all founts of good advice.

> As for complicating the OS X experience.  That is the last thing I 
> want to
> do.  (Rant on -- I keep wondering why must there be a Terminal 
> Application?
> Command Language?  It reminds me of MS-DOS which I avoided like the 
> plague.
> Just rhetorical, no need to answer. Rant off.)
>>
The Terminal is there primarily for the use and enjoyment of users who 
have a technical bent and can take advantage of it. There's TONS of 
cool stuff in there *if* you're comfortable with the world of the 
command-line. If you're not and you don't want to be, that's fine. 
There's no reason to ever toy with it.

It's not mandatory, but you see a lot of people referencing it (which 
may give the impression that it IS mandatory). This is because:

a. For those people, explaining how to do a thing in the Terminal may 
be faster/easier/more efficient/more familiar to them because they 
understand that world well. One of the big benefits of OS X is that 
Apple truly *has* crafted the Holy Grail of operating systems: one that 
is easy enough for normal people to use, yet powerful enough that geeks 
love it -- and all that power is completely ignorable if you prefer.

b. Certain operations, for example mass-deleting all .mp3 files 
scattered around a hard drive by typing "rm *.mp3", is a heck of a lot 
faster using the CLI than doing a Find, waiting for Find to return the 
results, then dragging those results to the trash, then emptying the 
trash.*

>> each user need only concern themselves with ONE folder that contains
>> ALL their created data.
>>
> Does that ONE folder contain the users e-mail?
>
Yep. And everything else the user creates or is created for the user. 
And each user's Home folder is completely separate from the others, so 
for example if you have a guest at your house for a month, you can set 
them up with their own account, and they can do with your machine what 
they like (to whatever extent YOU allow it), and when they're gone you 
delete the account and it's as though they were never there. Your stuff 
is untouched. Beautiful.

> In OS X, can CCC make backups only of recently changed data?  Like the
> business of the day instead of running the entire User Folder?  If 
> not, what
> about Retrospect Deluxe or Retrospect?  Another utility?
>
My understanding of Retrospect is that it does NOT make bootable 
backups, and hopefully someone will clarify this for me. CCC (with the 
aid of an automatic but additional install of "psync") can indeed be 
set to ONLY clone files that have changed, or it can be set to ONLY 
clone a specific folder, and it can be "scheduled." There's probably a 
lot more it can do, but you can check http://www.bombich.com for more 
information on that.

>> Periodically run a maintenance program such as OnyX (which does
>> everything pretty much automatically),
>
> Are you talking about that 3:15 to 5:30 AM stuff?

The only self-maintenance that OS X does (as of Panther) is:
1. An automatic fsck run after a forced restart.
2. Automatic defragging of files under 20MB in size as you open them.
3. Rotating/deleting of log files, a UNIX task that is scheduled to run 
early in the AM if the computer is not asleep.

OnyX does a lot more than that, but it does those things on demand. 
There are other programs that do this too, but I like Onyx because it's 
free and because it's easy to understand.

>   Cron jobs?

"Cron jobs" is a terribly misused term. IMO, it should only be used to 
refer to tasks that YOU have created and used the UNIX "cron" command 
to schedule. For example, let's say you never manually empty the trash, 
just place stuff in there. You set up a cron job to automatically empty 
the trash every 3 days at 6am. That's a cron job.

The "3:15 to 5:30 AM stuff" you refer to are properly called 
"housekeeping tasks" and are a preset "cron job" and so to avoid 
confusion should be called simply "housekeeping."

>   I just
> reviewed David Pogue's 1/3 page discussion on that.  He does not 
> mention 3rd
> party utilities.

He was either not aware of them at the time he wrote that, or he simply 
chose to emphasise that the computer can take care of this by itself if 
left on and not sleeping at the proper time. I'm sure there's even a 
way to "reschedule" the housekeeping but I wouldn't know how. The 
fundamental point people don't seem to understand is that it's no big 
deal if the computer doesn't get to do this housekeeping all the time 
-- running a general system utility like OnyX (Macaroni, Cocktail, etc) 
once a month will more than take care of it. Even if it NEVER gets 
done, it's very unlikely to cause problems in the five-year lifespan of 
most Macs.

_Chas_

Have you noticed that this administration's harshest critics are ... 
lifelong Republicans?
Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neil, John McCain, Scott Ritter, Pat Buchanan, 
John Dean, John O'Neill, David Kay ... and the list goes on ...