I got on my PowerMac G5 2.3x2 this morning and my hard drives were really going to town. I looked up and saw Spotlight was indexing. I clicked on it and it says it's indexing my computer and will take 15 hours.
That's really strange. No external hard drives, no new hard drives and no new data. But it's starting over. I guess that it got corrupted or something.
I've had this particular PowerMac for about 2 years, so obviously Spotlight has ran before.
Any ideas?
I've joined in on several discussions and blogs talking about the best way to backup your Aperture library immediately and long term.
Obviously you can use Aperture's great backup feature called the "Vault". That is smart actions that you take to choose a location to where you want to backup Aperture's files and when you update your photo library or make significant changes, the vault icon will turn red telling you to update. It's recommended to use an external hard drive or at least another hard drive that your main library is not on.
SO what if you want to use DVD's to backup? Well I've been mulling over this for a while. I want to have multiple backups and I want to have a disc based backup too. So the recently released Roxio Toast 8 for Mac came to mind. I just got it a few days ago and my findings are that it's a great upgrade from the older version. It does "Disc Spanning" for both Mac and PC on the same disc. So say my photo library is 100 gigs it would take about 25 4.7 gig discs to use. Toast will automatically embed the software needed to read the spanned disk and will restore your library.
Now optically what should you backup? At first I thought hands down just back up the aperture original library. Drag it into Toast and it will tell you how many discs it will take. Then after I started it, it was going to take about 30min on each disk with verification. Bah. that's a lot of time. So I canceled it and decided to think about it more.
If I backup my Aperture library in it's entirety, I need Aperture to read it when I want to recover it if something goes wrong. So what if I want just my photos and not all the data base stuff? I then thought it would be best to export all of my masters by Year/Month/Day and in a Folder called PhotoBackup. Then I could have all of my original photos backup (it doesn't do versions but it will export PSD files as masters). So i dragged the Parent folder "Photobackup" into Roxio Toast 8 and then do a cross platform disc span.
Now I have all of my photos in their original form backed up to Mac and PC format. Now I'm not swithching to PC anytime soon, but it's nice to know that I have the option. Also if I wanted to stop using Aperture for the next best app, i can just import my Photobackup with the Year/Month/Day scheme into another program. And then my photos aren't archived and be required to have Aperture to open them up. (I'm thinking long term here folks!)
After days of trying to print with Aperture to my Epson R200, I wasn't have much success. I followed all the rules, change the setting in the Epson R200 perfences to Photo RPM, and turn off color management. Back in forth etc. Print borderless was usless and I was having color banding issues and my prints looked horrible. I tried everything!
Untill i did more research.
Conclusions to all of the headaches and sleepless nights...
For some reason when you add the Epson R200 to your printer set up using the "plus" key it adds the wrong drivers and wrong color proflies. It says it's it but it isnt'.
You have to delete the one you added "normally" and go about it another way.
1. System Pref - Printers and Util
2. click add printer with plus sign
3. more printers
4. choose Epson USB under the drop down menu
5. click on the Stylus photo .....
6. under drop down menu for Page setup choose "Sheet Feeder Borderless"
7. Go back to Aperture and follow all the normal rules of printing.
MY LIFE HAS CHANGED.
well may be not too much but i've got consitent good looking real bona fide borderless printing now on my trusty R200.
I'm excited and I can finish the christmas gifts that I had in the works!
As a sad side note, my PowerMac's harddrive passed
away rather suddenly earlier this week. She started
having problems on Sunday- shortness of breath not
able to get up and move around, the usual signs. I
realized that she wasn't going to make it, so I
bought some expensive medication to help her recover
but didn't work. I put her to rest on tuesday after
having a long heated night of unwarrented recitation.
I replaced her yesterday with a new larger yet faster
model that will hopefully serve to a degree that elder
would be proud of. I was able tp transplant most of
her important organs to the new sibling, which made
her death much much more bearable.
o here is here is the lesson learned:
I had no warning what so ever that disk was failing.
Never made noise, S.M.A.R.T verified on Disk Utility
and Disk Warrior. I had a perfectly good backup but
was older. So I started a brand new back up and while
doing that the harddrive died. Which left me with no
bootable backup.
I will also run Disk Warrior now as a precation instead
of when everything has hit the fan. So if you can
afford it, have two backups on hand. If one fails when
updating, and then your master disk dies, then you have
the second backup to refer too.
I can't afford two backups now, but hopefully soon.
Tonight I am backing up my fresh install with fingers crossed!
Situation:
PowerMac was running fine. Did all updates last week (10.4.7, QT 7.1.1 etc) and everything worked fine. I thought i'd catch up my backup stuff so yesterday morning at 10am I tried out Super Duper! to do a backup. Before I ran the back up, I repaired permissions, and verified disk. Everything dandy. I then started full copy with Super Duper to external Firewire drive. I let it run but was taking forever. Finally 23 hours later it had only copied 58 gigs out of 89 gigs. So I decided to stop it.
Problem escalates here:
I pressed stop on Super Duper and it acted like it stopped. I waited a few minutes still no sign of stopping and back to normal. I then went to finder and Force Quit, and says Super Duper! stoped responding. I then forced quit SD. I waited a few more minutes. Nothing.By now Finder was completly locked up- Spinning Beach etc. Nothing. Waited a while longer- nothing. So i decided to shut power off my pressing power button. It shuts off.
Yikes begins:
System won't boot and it just goes to grey screen with apple logo. Fans rev up, nothing. Try about 5 times. I 'option- command-pr' to reset pram. nothing. I can't even get the CD tray open. So I reboot hold down 'option' and go to boot menu. Press 'eject' on keyboard and try opens. I put in tiger disk, and try to repair disk.
Error: "The Underlying task reported failure on Exit". I run repair disk about 5 times.
Disk Warrior:
I do some research on the forums. I head to Apple Store to pick up Disk Warrior 3.0.3. $106 dollars later I am at hope it will work. I ran the maintance script and S.M.A.R.T. disk verified .
So now Disk Warrior is saying this:
Rebuilding Directory
Locating Directory data
'Speed inhibited by disk malfunction'.
It's been running for about 5 hours now. And the blue progress line is almost half way. I heard the record running DW was 28 days! wow.
So now i am waiting. But i figured i'd post this stuff on the forums so people in same situtation would know what it's like.
So what about my FW backup that stopped at 58 gigs out of 89? i freaked and thought the same thing. Websites,movies,pics yada yada. Well I used my powerbook to check the back up and my user folder is there- with what it seems like all of my data! So I may have all my data for now- but not a bootable clone with apps etc.
Ok, don't want to write too much but just getting it out there.
If i have my data - ok. But loading back all the programs will be a pain.
I'll be posting updates of what happens. thanks for reading and if you have any suggestions, please shoot them this way!