Mac Stuff

With the release of Lion Apple has added a new, somewhat hidden, ability to Time Machine. The ability to do local snapshots. Basically, when you are away from your Time Machine disc and have this enabled Lion will create your hourly snapshots locally instead of on your backup drive. Once you re-connect the drive it will move them over to your drive and wipe them off the local disc.

This is a great service for laptop users. Now you can have those hourly snapshots created no matter where you are. So, if you make some changes to a document while you’re away those changes will still be added to your Time Machine backup.

To enable these local snapshots you have use the new command-line tool for Time Machine named tmutil.

To enable local snapshots:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

To disable them AND clear all the local snapshots:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

You can confirm that you’ve enabled local snapshots by opening System Preferences > Time Machine and looking for the line circled in the image.

The tmutil utility has a bunch of other useful commands that allow you to enable or disable backups, start and stop backups, choose a new disk, etc. Type man tmutil to see the whole list. I can see this tool being used by lots of system administrators in scripts.

Apple also has a nice KB article explaining this feature here

webmaster :: Nov.17.2011 :: Management, Scripts, shell scripts, System :: 3 Comments »

Just about everyone with an iOS device has bought or gotten free apps that they thought would be cool or useful and then decided they didn’t need it. Deleting from your device is easy but what about your iTunes library? Especially now with iCloud keeping track of everything it’s not so obvious. It’s an especially annoying thing when you keep seeing updates for all those apps showing up in the various App stores. With the release of iTunes 10.5 you can now hide those apps from view AND from updating.

The technique is basically the same in iTunes as well as on your device:

1. Click on the iTunes Store
2. Click the Purchased link on the far right
3. Pick your content (Music, Books, Apps, etc.)
4. Hover over the item you want to hide until you see the “X”
5. Click the “X” to hide that purchase

Here are the links to the Apple KB articles on both the iTunes and Mac App stores and how to hide the unwanted apps.

iTunes Store: Hiding and unhiding purchases

Mac App Store: Hiding and unhiding purchases

webmaster :: Nov.15.2011 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off on Hiding old purchases in the iTunes/Mac App stores