Backup

[DVDSP]

I've run into a problem lately, if I leave my computer unattended for a while (say 5+ hours) but I leave iTunes playing an Internet radio station I will return to find that my HD space (on my OS X partition) is down to about 20MB free from almost 500. Simply logging out and logging back in fixes my missing hard drive space but I usually have other things that get f-ed up in the process, such as: All my email accounts need to be reentered into Mail; I have to go through the "Set-Up" screen for iTunes and/or iChat; I need to reset my prefs for Safari, etc.

Anyway, I find it a pain to reenter my email accounts and was thinking of using Backup, however, I'm not sure which files I need to back up just to retreive the accounts. I don't want to back up everything in my Inbox, Outbox, Sent, etc., just the account info.

Any ideas?

Also, what gives with the HD "lossing" space when leaving the radio on? If I check my free space periodically it doesn't seem to change but if I'm out for a while and come back it's dropped. I don't get it.

Thanks,

 

[King Cobra]

-->I leave iTunes playing an Internet radio station I will return to find that my HD space (on my OS X partition) is down to about 20MB free from almost 500. (DVDSP)

I gasped so hard when I read that.

NEVER let your partition (or HD space) run any lower than the amount of RAM your computer has. If your machine has 768MB of RAM, have at least 768MB of space on your Hard Drive.

-->what gives with the HD "lossing" space when leaving the radio on?

One word: Cache

Every stream at every bitrate you stream is stored to your iTunes Cache for as long as your computer has uptime.

-->I find it a pain to reenter my email accounts and was thinking of using Backup, however, I'm not sure which files I need to back up just to retreive the accounts. I don't want to back up everything in my Inbox, Outbox, Sent, etc., just the account info.

What is your mail application? If it is Mail as provided with OS X, you can go into ~/Library and copy your Mail folder. Inside is every message in your Mail.app program.

But -->I find it a pain to reenter my email accounts<-- if you just want to keep your configuration settings, take a look inside ~/Library/Preferences and do a search for the following .plist files:

com.apple.internetconfig.plist
com.apple.internetconnect.plist
com.apple.internetpref.plist

com.apple.PrefPane.Network

For the com.apple.PrefPane.Network .plist file, there may be a series of letters and numbers attached to the end of the filename. Save each such file.

Example: Here are my PrefPane.Newtork .plist filenames:

com.apple.PrefPane.Network.003065b30000.plist
com.apple.PrefPane.Network.003065dd8926.plist

Save each of these .plist files. They hold your account information.

Also, if you are using Mail.app for e-mail, save the preference:

com.apple.mail.plist

This holds every setting for your Mail.app preferences, as well as any mail rules you have set up.

If you are going to back up your computer, I would recommend saving the entire preferences folder. I refreshed both of my machines within the past week, and saving folder also has saved me at least 4 hours' worth of reinputting settings and information, etc.

 

[DVDSP]

Originally posted by King Cobra
One word: Cache

Every stream at every bitrate you stream is stored to your iTunes Cache for as long as your computer has uptime.

Ya know, I thought of that, too. However, if that is the case then shouldn't I see the available space on my HD dropping slowly the whole time? I doesn't. It will remain rock solid for hours. Then, after I've left it unattended I come back to this huge drop in free space.

Anyway, thanks for the Mail help. I'm backing up now. By the way, I do use OS X Mail.

Thanks again,

 

[gopher]

Strictly speaking, Mac OS X hard disks should never go under 1.5 GB of space free. Everything else will slow it down.

Use http://www.bombich.com/ Carbon Copy Cloner to backup to an external hard drive that is Firewire or SCSI depending on your built-in port. If you have neither Firewire nor SCSI, you shouldn't run Mac OS X on that machine since recovering from backup by reinstalling disks is so much more a pain than simply making mirror backups. I strongly recommend you keep copies of your iTunes and iPhoto Library folders taking up the most space on a couple more drives that way freeing up space on your main drive.