Tag Archives: mac os

Slow Time Machine with Time Capsule – SOLVED!

Let me guess — you bought a new Time Capsule, set up your Time Machine to back up half a terabyte of family photos and home videos, and expected it to be “hands-free” from then on? Then you got this progress bar saying that it will take 563 days (or some such ridiculous number) to sync?

Your next step was to trawl Google, which would have shown you that you are not alone. You would have tried disk utility to repair your Time Capsule disk, disabled Spotlight indexing, connected your Mac directly to TC etc. Nothing has helped so far? Fear not, here is what you need to do.

First of all, launch your software update pane from your system preferences on your Mac.

Mac Software Update
Ensure that you have this update, which specifically addresses this problem.
Mac Software Update

Here is what Apple says about this update:

About OS X Lion 10.7.5 Supplemental Update
The OS X v10.7.5 Supplemental Update is recommended for all users running OS X Lion v10.7.5 and includes the following fixes:

  • Resolves an issue that may cause Time Machine backups to take a very long time to complete
  • Addresses an issue that prevents certain applications signed with a Developer ID from launching

If it is not installed, click on the “Scheduled Check” tab, and install it. Note that it may be installed as bundled with other updates. So, as long as your Mac is up-to-date, you don’t have to worry too much about missing this particular update.

In all likelihood, this update is all that you will need to fix your slow Time Machine on Time Capsule To verify, restart your machine and launch Time Machine. Give it a few minutes and see if the speed is acceptable (about 10-20 MB a second on your wired Gigabit network).

If it is not, or if you have other reasons for not installing the update, there are a few other these tips you can try.

  • QuickSilver and Dropbox iconsQuit applications that may be indexing the file system. Dropbox, QuickSilver etc.  Find them on your menu bar. Right click on the icons and select Quit.
  • Finder optionEnsure that Finder is not set to show all size. Open a Finder window, hit Cmd-J to bring up these options, and ensure that the Calculate All Sizes is not ticked (despite the fact that it is shown ticked in the screenshot here).

    Note that it is not under the usual Finder preferences, which you would bring up using Cmd-I.

  • Kill FinderThe last thing to try is to kill and relaunch Finder. Click on the Apple logo on any menu bar, select “Force Quit…” to bring up the window show, select Finder and hit the Relaunch button

The last step (of killing and relaunching Finder) has been touted as something that definitely works. So do give it a try if nothing else helps. Another way of killing and relaunching Finder is to issue the command killall Finder from a terminal window.

If these tips didn’t work, you are pretty much out of luck. There are still one more thing you could try, which probably will not work. It certainly didn’t, for me, but gave me a sense that I was “fixing” the problem.

Connect your Time Capsule (TC) directly to your Mac. In order to do this, follow these steps.

  • First, connect your TC to your network, and set it up using the Airport Utility.
  • Disconnect it from your network. (Disconnect the ethernet cable.)
  • Disconnect the ethernet cable from your Mac, and connect TC (one of the three output ports) to your Mac.

How to Avoid Duplicate Imports in iPhoto

For the budding photographer in you, iPhoto is a godsend. It is the iLife photo organization program that comes pre-installed on your swanky new iMac or Mac Book Air. In fact, I would go as far as to say that iPhoto is one of the main reasons to switch to a Mac. I know, there are alternatives, but for seamless integration and smooth-as-silk workflow, iPhoto reigns supreme.

iPhotoTaggerBut (ah, there is always a “but”), the workflow in iPhoto can create a problem for some. It expects you to shoot pictures, connect your camera to your Mac, move the photos from the camera to the Mac, enhance/edit and share (Facebook, flickr) or print or make photo books. This flow (with some face recognition, red-eye removal, event/album creation etc.) works like a charm — if you are just starting out with your new digital camera. What if you already have 20,000 old photos and scans on your old computer (in “My Pictures”)?

This is the problem I was faced with when I started playing with iPhoto. I pride myself in anticipating such problems. So, I decided to import my old library very carefully. While importing “My Pictures” (which was fairly organized to begin with), I went through it folder by folder, dragging-and-dropping them on iPhoto and, at the same time, labeling them (and the photos therein) with what I thought were appropriate colors. (I used the “Get Info” function in Finder for color labels.) I thought I was being clever, but I ended up with a fine (but colorful) mess, with my folders and photos sporting random colors. It looked impossible to compare and figure out and where my 20,000 photos got imported to in iPhoto; so I decided to write my very first Mac App — iPhotoTagger. It took me about a week to write it, but it sorted out my photo worries. Now I want to sell it and make some money.

Here is what it does. It first goes through your iPhoto library and catalogs what you have there. It then scans the folder you specify and compares the photos in there with those in your library. If a photo is found exactly once, it will get a Green label, so that it stands out when you browse to it in your Finder (which is Mac-talk for Windows Explorer). Similarly, if the photo appears more than once in your iPhoto library, it will be tagged in Yellow. And, going the extra-mile, iPhotoTagger will color your folder Green if all the photos within have been imported into your iPhoto library. Those folders that have been partially imported will be tagged Yellow.

The photo comparison is done using Exif data, and is fairly accurate. Note that iPhotoTagger doesn’t modify anything within your iPhoto library. Doing so would be unwise. It merely reads the library to gather information.

This first version (V1.0) is released to test the waters, as it were, and is priced at $1.99. If there is enough interest, I will work on V2.0 with improved performance (using Perl and SQLite, if you must know). I will price it at $2.99. And, if the interest doesn’t wane, a V3.0 (for $3.99) will appear with a proper help file, performance pane, options to choose your own color scheme, SpotLight comments (and, if you must know, probably rewritten in Objective-C). Before you rush to send me money, please know that iPhotoTagger requires Snow Leopard and Lion (OS-X 10.6 and 10.7). If in doubt, you can download the lite version and play with it. It is fully functional, and will create lists of photos/folders to be tagged in Green and Yellow, but won’t actually tag them.