I decided it was time to install Mountain Lion on my MacBook Pro.
I usually wait to upgrade anything until the early adopters have worked with the producer of the software to iron out the bugs that inevitably show up. Also, I want to give the third party developers of other software a chance to get their products to work with the new operating system or the new hardware. I try always to wait until we are past version 1.0 and are on at least version 1.1.
I finally have a reason to upgrade
One thing caught my eye and made me realize I was missing out by not having Mountain Lion. My cable box has two tuners. This means I can only record two programs at a time or record one program while watching another. In my local TV-watching area, “Nikita”, “Grimm”, and “Fringe” all come on at the same time. So I recorded “Nikita” and “Fringe”. I can watch “Grimm” the night after it airs by going to the NBC web site. But that means watching it on a small screen like my iPad or my MacBook Pro. Mountain Lion may offer me an alternative!
With Mountain Lion comes AirPlay. That means, as I understand it, with an AppleTV hooked up to what I euphemistically call my "entertainment center", I can navigate to the NBC web site and start up “Grimm” and watch it on the TV screen.
Preparing for the upgrade
I first made sure I had a bootable backup of my MacBook Pro's hard drive. I use Personal Backup from Intego for that purpose. It actually uses your previous backup as a basis and just does an incremental backup, so that takes a much shorter time than a full backup would. I had to run it twice. The first time it reported scanning 1,393,340 files, resulting in a task of copying 474,245 files and deleting 61,603 files. It ended up copying 471,615 files in 3 hours, 22 minutes. But I ended up getting 3900 errors. It appeared to me, looking at the error log, that it was trying to find documents on my laptop that no longer exist. Running it a second time, it scanned 1,330,497 files (since it had deleted the 61,000 files) resulting in a task of copying 242,979 files and deleting 248 files. This time it only reported five errors. So I felt I had a good bootable backup that I could use if an emergency arose.
Just to be sure, I rebooted from the bootable backup. One of the ways you can do this is by going into System Preferences and changing the Startup Disk. The backup worked fine. So I rebooted from my regular laptop hard drive.
Next I looked at the RoaringApps web site. This site gives you a very comprehensive list of applications and informs you of whether they are compatible with Lion or Mountain Lion. Even though I found an application I use that isn't compatible with Mountain Lion, one that has some problems, and one that wasn't even listed, I decided to proceed anyway.
Ready to download the installer
The only way to get Mountain Lion is by downloading it from the App Store.
Once it was downloaded, I found an app called Install OS X Mountain Lion in my "Applications" folder. The first thing I needed to do was to burn this app to a DVD. This way if I ever run into problems where I have to reinstall Mountain Lion, I will have a ready copy of the installation application. You will find that after you install Mountain Lion, this application will disappear from your “Applications” folder.
After that was done, I was ready to run the Install OS X Mountain Lion application. The first thing I had to do is agree to the license. Next, I was asked to select a place to install it. (My laptop hard drive showed up as the only choice). The next thing I saw was, "Preparing to install. Your computer will restart automatically". It indicated there were 3 minutes remaining to finish.
After it completed that procedure, the message appeared "Will restart in __ seconds." You may click a button to restart sooner. It told me that it needed to close all open applications. Once I clicked my approval, it then proceeded.
The next message I saw was, "Installing OSX on the disk. Time remaining: About 34 minutes." The computer just sat there for at least a minute before I saw any change to the screen. Finally I saw the progress bar move.
Mountain Lion is installed!
It finished an hour and fifteen minutes later. A message appeared stating that some of my software was not compatible and may cause problems, and therefore it was moved. The message said I could delete the software anytime I chose. The two pieces of software it specifically mentioned were Parallels and VMFusion, both applications used to run Windows in emulation on my laptop. An “Incompatible Software” folder was created at the root level of my laptop hard drive (the same place you find your “Applications” folder and your “Users” folder.) There I found the files and applications that the installation process had moved.
The first application I opened, of course, was Mail. A message appeared on the screen saying that the Antispam Engine would like to access my contacts to pre-populate my list of trusted e-mail sources. You are given the choice of OKing this or not. It seemed a reasonable thing to do, so I OK’d it.
But then Mail crashed. In the window that appears when an application crashes, the information in the crash report indicated that the creation of the Sandbox had failed and that the Container object initialization had failed. I clicked to send the report to Apple and relaunch Mail.
This time a window opened with the message, “Welcome to Mail”. I was also told that existing messages needed to be upgraded. After OKing this, I was told that Mail was upgrading my Mail database.
Next I was asked about how I'm dealing with junk mail. I was given three options: ask again later, stay in training, switch to automatic. So I spent some time setting up Mail the way I'm used to using it modifying the tool bar, setting up how to handle junk mail, whether to show the side bar, etc.
Finally, I was able to look around to see if I could see if anything had changed to the desktop. The first thing I noticed was a new icon to the right of the Spotlight magnifying glass in the Menu Bar. It looks like a checklist. This is the new Notification Center, which I anticipate may take the place of Growl. I’ll have to make that decision after I have used it for awhile. Right now, the only notifications I see in the Notification Center are those dealing with iCal. When you click on the icon, your whole desktop moves to the left, and your list of notifications are displayed. At the bottom is an icon that I guess is supposed to be a gear wheel. When you click on it, System Preferences opens to the Notifications Preferences where you can choose how it will work for you.
Any new software updates after installation?
I decided at this point to check again for software updates that may apply specifically to Mountain Lion.
The Software Update menu selection under the Apple icon in the menu bar took me to the App Store instead of opening the Software Update application like in Lion. I couldn't see any way to ignore the one software update that I was told I needed. It involved RAWimages compatibility when uploading pictures. I don't have a camera that has the capability to download RAW images, so I didn’t need this software update. I finally found the answer about how to ignore this update in the MacRumor forums. The solution was to make sure that the full description of the update is showing. (You click on "More..." if necessary in order to show the full description.) Then you right click in the window. "Hide update" will appear on the screen. Click on that. That hides the software update. You can get it back later if you want to by selecting "Show all software updates " in the App Store "Store" menu.
The next thing I attempted was to open iPhoto. At my first attempt at doing this, iPhoto crashed. On my second attempt, it Informed me that my photo library had to be updated and that large libraries could take hours to complete. Mine took less than a minute. But then there were two windows open, one normal window displaying pictures, another window with no pictures. When I tried to close that one, iPhoto quit. When I reopened it, everything was back to normal.
The next day I was asked if I want to enable dictation. I was also warned that if I did, my contacts and other information will be sent to Apple. I enabled it, but I don't expect to use it much.
By this time I was able to take stock of how much space I had lost on my hard drive by upgrading to Mountain Lion. I was surprised that I actually saw a reduction of 4 GB of space used.
Up and running
So I am up and running with Mountain Lion. For the work that I do, not much has changed that affects my day-to-day use of the computer. Once I got over the bumps described above, I haven’t had anything else that has interrupted my work.
So a week has gone by, and I was anxiously looking forward to viewing “Grimm” on my TV using AirPlay. But when I called up the TV program in my browser and was ready to watch it, I couldn’t see how to get it to work. I thought I was supposed to see an AirPlay icon in my menu bar or somewhere, like maybe in the browser window. So I Googled my question and was taken to the Apple Support pages. It turns out I don’t have a MacBook Pro that is able to use the AirPlay mirroring. I have a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro and it requires an Early 2011 or newer.
If you have read my previous blogs you know that I have over 50,000 files totaling over 30 GB that I want to back up to an off-site location. Because of the large number of files, I decided that most of the back-up services offered out there would not suit my situation. Those services are good for handling collaborative projects or for backing up particular "important" files and folders. But they are not set up to work with large numbers of files. I learned that what I needed was a "file storage" service.
After settling on Online Storage Solution (OLS-CS) to be my file storage service, my next task was to get my files copied to their servers.
I found that I could use the Finder and drag and drop files and folders that are located on my computer's hard drive to the Network Drive opened when connecting to OLS-CS. Or I could use an FTP client software to copy the files. This took a long time to move all the files in my Documents folder. Working on and off, it took about 5 days.
But once I had done that I realized that whenever I made a change to a file, or added or deleted a file, I would have to remember what I had done so I could copy those files to the OLS-CS servers. That would require a lot of effort and would be prone to errors. I needed a back-up program that would identify those incremental changes to my files and folders and copy the changed items to the Network Drive.
If you read my blog of July 23, you know that I had originally tried to use the back-up programs I own to get the files copied over, and that I ended up using my FTP software, Fetch, and the Finder instead. But I now knew that I had to be able to use a back-up program. So I tried once again.
The backup program that I have been using the longest is FoldersSynchronizer by softoBe. It has been around a very long time and is very easy to use. When I tried to use it, however, I found that the connection to the Network Drive gets dropped every once in awhile. It may appear to be connected when you look at the Network Drive in the Finder. The Finder wouldn't change appearances if the drop was only momentary. FoldersSynchronizer, however, stops the backup. It apparently has no way of resuming the upload once the connection is broken. In my research on the Internet, apparently the technology exists for resuming downloads, but it is much more difficult to resume an upload.
Another thing I began to realize as I started trying to use a back-up program is that in order for the program to do an incremental backup, it has to keep track of what existed before it begins doing the backup. So the total time it will take to do the incremental backup depends on how long it takes to scan the files to see which ones were changed, which ones are new, and which ones are no longer there.
When I saw that my old stand-by, FoldersSynchronizer, wasn't going to work, I decided to try a program I bought more recently, Intego's Personal Backup. I tried using it for several days. It seemed to make progress, but then it would quit. Each time it scanned my files to build a database of the files it would need to change. That process took three hours. Then it would start copying files to the Network Drive until the connection was broken, at which time it would simply stop copying. There is no error message. You just have to look at the information being provided and notice that nothing is changing. Each time you restart, there are fewer total files to copy because in the meantime the vast majority of them have not changed. Gradually you will get it down to the point where everything has been copied, and the only thing that will need to be updated are the files that you actually added, modified, or deleted during the period since the last backup.
Since I had already copied all my files to the Network Drive using FTP and the Finder, I couldn't figure out why FoldersSynchronizer and Personal Backup were finding that the files had changed and they had to copy the files all over again despite my previous effort. I eventually noticed that the creation, modification, and last modified dates were all being changed! When these programs copied the files to the Network Drive, the old dates were not being retained! Instead all the files were being given the date they were copied to the Network Drive.
I fired off a quick email to Support for FoldersSynchronizer, but never received a reply. My research on the internet tells me that this is a common problem and it is pretty much a mystery as to why this happens.
In my next blog I decide to go shopping for a backup program that won't fail when the connection to the Network Drive breaks. Stay tuned.
Backing up files
After setting up the off-site backup service I chose (see previous blog), and testing it a bit, I decided it was time to get serious. If this solution was going to work for me, it had to at least handle all the files I had in my Documents folder.
When I did a "Get Info" (Command-I) on my Documents folder, it said that I had a little over 30 GB in the folder.
FoldersSynchronizer
My favorite program for backing up files, outside of the scheduled Time Machine backup, is FoldersSynchronizer by softoBe. I have used this program for years whenever I wanted to back up an entire folder of files to an external location. I never have used it for trying to synchronize files.
As indicated in the previous blog, there are two major ways of getting to your files on the off-site location. One is to access them through an FTP program. The other is to get to them by opening the Network Drive using the Finder.
So I started by trying to use FolderSynchronizer to copy all the files in my Documents folder to a Documents folder which I created in my area on Online Storage Solution (OLS-CS). I went to the "Go" menu of the Finder, then "Connect to Server . . .", then entered the server address. Once I was connected, the network server appears as a disk drive on the desktop and as a shared device in the left panel of a Finder window. From this point you can treat the device just as any other hard drive connected to your computer, creating folders, dragging files from one folder to another, etc.
With FoldersSynchronizer, you drag the source folder to the top of the Copy window and the destination folder to the bottom of the Copy window. When you click the "Copy" button, the program starts inventorying the files it will have to copy. Then it starts copying the files from the source to the destination. I got an error message almost immediately which said that I didn't have permission to access the folder on the Network drive. I have no idea why that error was received. That is a mystery that can wait for another day. Instead, I tried using Personal Backup, part of the Intego suite of products, which I also own.
This worked, after a fashion. By the time it had taken an inventory of what it was going to copy, it was predicting it would take over 3 days to finish. I let it run for an hour. In that time it had copied about 500 MB. Since I had been able to copy 2 GB in a half hour the day before, I decided to quit.
Doing things manually
I decided to do things manually using FTP, or simply dragging and dropping using the Finder. If you have a lot to do, FTP is better because if you use drag and drop and encounter an error, everything just stops and you have to figure out what was copied and what wasn't and start over from there. FTP does some error handling.
Because I had stopped the backup that had started, I had to determine how far the backup had gotten. Then I started dragging and dropping groups of files from that point using the Finder. I wanted to get to a point where I could drag and drop whole folders using FTP.
I probably would have been better off just letting the backup run using Personal Backup. It ended up taking me 6 days to complete the backup. It actually might have been better that I did end up doing it more or less manually because some things happened along the way.
In the first place, the OLS-CS server was down for a few hours two days in a row. The first time (on 7/18) it was down for about 3 hours. The second time (on 7/19), it was down for about 2 hours. After the two hours, it appeared to be up. I could get to my files. However, I couldn't copy files to my folders. Later in the evening when I tried, I had full functionality back. Hopefully this service won't experience too many outages like that. I tried submitting a help ticket, but this time I never got a reply.
Secondly, I ran across my Virtual Windows XP machine in my Documents folder. That one file is over 8 GB. It is the file that is used by a program called "Parallels" to run Microsoft Windows on my Mac. My FTP program, Fetch, was copying it as a text file. (I had Fetch set up to automatically select the correct format--text, binary, etc., when copying files.) Fetch was uploading the 8GB file at 34 KB/s. It was reporting that it would take 59 hours. Well, none of that made any sense, so I just decided to be satisfied with on-site backups for that file. I stopped the copying of the file and deleted it off the Network drive.
One thing I observed was that the time it takes to do a backup will depend on the upload speed you are able to get out of your connection. When I started working on Friday, the upload speed started out at between 122 & 124 KB/s. At one point on Saturday, I was only getting 73 KB/s. In the evening Saturday, I saw 265 KB/s. That didn't last long. It was soon down to the 160's range. The speed will change while the backup is in progress.
Job completed (for now)
I finished backing up the Documents folder on Saturday. I think I still need to back up my photos and music off-site. But that may not be true anymore now that Apple has made iCloud available. But I may wait a couple weeks before I attempt to figure that out. I want to continue testing this new service I've contracted with for a bit longer before I take these additional steps.
