Media Meltdowns
I have converted many old VHS tapes to DVD-R, using name-brand media. When I tried to view one of my DVDs 18 months later, it stalled, skipped, and stopped dead in its tracks. I watched the DVD right after burning it, and it played perfectly. I thought that once I made a successful DVD, it would last basically forever. What’s going on?—Mike Volpe
Although the folks who manufacture DVDs claim that the discs can last for years, they base that claim on lab tests designed to simulate the aging process. When it comes to the real world, only time will tell.
Factors that can contribute to failing media are poor quality (not all DVDs are created equal), humidity, sunlight, and abuse. But you can lessen the impact of these factors.
To begin with, buy good media. Those in the know suggest that Taiyo Yuden’s products are reliable and stable when treated well. A Google search will turn up American companies that sell this Japanese brand. Next, carefully store your discs in an environment that’s as moisture- and sunlight-free as you can find—for example, in an airtight container with a silica gel pack, tucked away in a cupboard. And you should, of course, put discs back in their cases rather than leaving them atop a hot AV amplifier or letting your five-year-old use them as Frisbees.
Your tale of woe also demonstrates that one should never rely on a single backup to a particular medium. The more copies you make, and the more different media you use, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to recover your data down the road.
iPod Insurance
I know that iPods suffer glitches with some frequency, and reloading all my tunes is quite a tedious and frustrating process. Is there an easy way to store a perfect clone that I can put back on the iPod in case of emergency?—Bob Marketos
Mike Bombich’s $5 Carbon Copy Cloner can do the job. Connect your iPod to your Mac and launch Carbon Copy Cloner. From the Source Disk pop-up menu, select your iPod. From the Target Disk pop-up menu, choose the hard drive where you want to store your backup (see “Prone to Clone”). Click on the Preferences button; in the sheet that appears, enable the Create A Disk Image On Target option. Click on Save, click on the lock icon next to the Clone button, enter your administrator password in the resulting sheet, and click on OK to dismiss the sheet. Click on the Clone button, and the program will begin cloning everything on the iPod to a disk image on the target drive.
If you need to restore this backup to your iPod, first erase the iPod by installing the latest iPod Updater. Then, on the target drive, double-click on the disk image to mount it. (It will be called name of iPod. sparseimage, where name of iPod is the name of your iPod.) Launch Carbon Copy Cloner, choose the mounted disk image as the source, and choose the iPod as the target. Click on the lock icon again. Once you’ve entered the required password, click on the Clone button. Carbon Copy Cloner will copy the data stored in the disk image back to the iPod. Once the process is complete, your iPod will regain all the music and data it had when you first cloned it. Naturally, it won’t have any music or data you’ve added since then.
Another alternative should be available by the time you read this: ProSoft Engineering’s $59 TuneTech. ProSoft says that in addition to backing up your iPod, TuneTech will repair it, optimize its playlists so they’re more efficient (meaning that your iPod’s hard drive has to spin up less often, thus saving the battery charge), salvage some deleted files, shred data, duplicate the iPod’s contents to another iPod, and scan the iPod’s drive for damage.
Simpler Spotlight
Is there any way to make Spotlight search just document names and not the contents of the tens of thousands of files I have on my hard disk?—Ron Belisle
The best solution I’ve found is to enter your search term inside quotation marks. Although this doesn’t narrow your search to just document names, it does narrow it to instances when those words appear together. For this reason, the closer you come to the file’s full name, the more accurate your results will be.
For example, if I enter
Mac 911 invoicewith no quotation marks, Spotlight offers 151 matches (and would offer scads more if I used an e-mail client that Spotlight indexes, such as Apple’s Mail ). Some of these results contain those three magic words in the document’s title. When I enter
“Mac 911 invoice”, with quotation marks included, however, I see 30 results, all of which have the words Mac 911 invoice in the title. But note that this trick works only when you enter entire words. If I enter
“Mac 911 inv”, for instance, I get bubkes. There’s no need to worry about iPod accidents—you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a perfect copy of your data and restore your iPod for next to nothing.
Tools of the Trade: Have tools, will travel
Having recently spent several weeks on the road talking up Macs and the voodoo they do, I thought I’d cover the troubleshooting tools and utilities I pack when traveling. When my bags pass through airport security, here’s what shows up on the X-ray machine:
• iPod My iPod pulls double-duty when I travel—it not only holds enough music to get me through a couple of long flights, but also carries a bootable version of OS X, any applications and files I need for my trip, and the troubleshooting utilities required to fix my PowerBook if things go wrong. Creating a bootable iPod is no big deal. Your iPod should be 10GB or larger in order to hold a full installation of OS X and the files you need. To install OS X on the iPod, just treat it like any FireWire drive and follow the usual OS X installation procedure.
• Bootable Utility and OS Discs I always travel with bootable Disk Warrior and Drive Genius discs, as well as a Tiger installation DVD. But since I don’t dare risk damaging those discs while on the road, I bring copies. My original Disk Warrior disc isn’t compatible with Tiger anyway, so I’ve downloaded the free DiskWarrior 3.0.3 CD Update, which allows me to create a Tiger-compatible bootable copy of the Disk Warrior CD. As for the Drive Genius and OS X discs, I use Apple’s Disk Utility to burn bootable copies.
To do so, insert the disc you want to copy, launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), select the disc in the left side of the Disk Utility window, and choose File: New: Disk Image From name of disc, substituting the name of the disc you’ve selected. In the Convert Image dialog box that appears, choose DVD/CD Master from the Image Format pop-up menu and None from the Encryption pop-up menu, and then click on Save.
Once you’ve created the image, select it in the left side of the Disk Utility window, insert a blank disc of the appropriate type (a CD-R if the original disc was a CD, for example), and click on the Burn button at the top of the window. In the sheet that appears, click on Burn again. When the disc is complete, it should contain an exact copy of the original, one that’s capable of booting your Mac.
• Cables The beautiful freedom of wireless networks hasn’t yet reached much of the world, so my gear bag includes cables. Specifically, I carry a 6-foot Ethernet cable, a phone cable, two USB cables (one for standard peripherals and another with the kind of mini USB connector routinely found on digital cameras), and a 6-foot FireWire cable (helpful when I need to link my PowerBook and another Mac via FireWire Target Disk mode).
Tip of the Month: Wake the sleeping Tiger
Before Tiger, you could configure OS X’s security settings to require a password when the computer woke from sleep or from a screen saver. Unfortunately, that meant the computer’s other legitimate users couldn’t log in without that password. Tiger offers a workaround.
First, go to the Security preference pane and select the Require Password To Wake This Computer From Sleep Or Screen Saver option. Then go to the Accounts preference pane. If necessary, click on the lock at the bottom of the window and enter an administrator password. Click on Login Options and select the Enable Fast User Switching option. Now, when the computer wakes up, the Authenticate dialog box includes a Switch User button. Click on this button to go to the login window, where other users can enter an account name and password to use the Mac. — Stephen Holland
[ Senior Editor Christopher Breen is the author of Secrets of the iPod , fifth edition (Peachpit Press, 2005) and The iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press, 2005). ]