Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Avinash Meetoo

Incremental backup of iPhoto ’08 library using SuperDuper!

By 13 Comments

iPhoto is an excellent Mac OS X application created by Apple which is used by countless amateurs (like yours truly) to manage their digital photo collection. Since the release of iPhoto ’08, a lot of people have wondered how to do an incremental backup of their library as this latest version of iPhoto keeps the library in a package (a special type of folder) instead of a plain folder and some backup applications have trouble with that. (An update: I tried doing the same thing with the latest HFS+-aware version of rsync 3.0 but I couldn’t do it as it seems to me that rsync does not copy all the metadata created by Mac OS X. Maybe I missed an option…)

 

I’ve managed to do incremental backups (i.e. quick and painless) using my registered version of SuperDuper! It’s important to use a registered version of SuperDuper! in order to do smart updates which is what SuperDuper! calls incremental backups. The non-registered version of SuperDuper! cannot do incremental backups which means that the whole iPhoto library will be copied over when doing a backup (which means 15Gb in my case…)

This great backup software is normally used to backup a whole partition (i.e. my MacBook’s hard disk) to another partition (i.e. a partition on an external drive which can then be used to boot the MacBook.) I’ve just realized that it’s relatively straightforward to restrict the files to be backed up to a selection (i.e. your iPhoto library only…) and, instead of the destination being a partition, to choose a sparse image (i.e. a special file containing other files and which takes up only as much actual disk space as the data contained within.)

Step 1

First of all, select the partition where the iPhoto ’08 library resides in ‘Copy’ (mine is Multimedia.) Then select where the sparse image will reside (I chose a folder on another disk.) Then you’ll have to create what SuperDuper! calls a copy script which will be used to indicate what to copy and what to ignore. To do that click on the drop down next to ‘using’ and choose ‘New Copy Script.’

Step 2

Write a nice description and make sure that the ‘Allow the user to select this script’ is ticked.

Step 3

In the ‘Included Scripts’ tab, click on the ‘+’ and choose the predefined ‘Exclude all files’ script. This is to make sure that SuperDuper! only backups those files and folders that you’ll explicitly specify and ignore all the rest. This is essential.

Step 4

Then, in the ‘Script Commands’ tab, navigate to the folder where the iPhoto library is found and select it. Click on ‘Add Item’ and it will be added in the top part of the window. The default command is ‘ignore.’ Change that to ‘copy.’ As you can easily guess, this, combined with the ‘Exclude all files’ seen previously, will tell SuperDuper! to only consider the iPhoto library and nothing else which is what we want.

Click on ‘Close.’ and give a sensible name to the script (‘Backup iPhoto library’ is nice…)

Then you can click on ‘Copy Now’ and, voilà, an incremental backup is done! Remember to use a registered version of SuperDuper!

Rest in peace, Randy Pausch

By 7 Comments

Randy Pausch, Professor at Carnegie-Mellon university, died yesterday of complications from pancreatic cancer at the age of 47.

A few weeks ago, Gavin and I watched his last lecture, Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and it was a nice experience. This guy knew he was going to die, yet he was happy to give a last lecture in front of a packed audience and talk about how he felt he had managed to achieve most of his dreams (like being in zero-gravity, working at Walt Disney Imagineering and creating Alice, a 3D environment to learn programming.) The video is available on YouTube.

What struck me during Randy Pausch’s last lecture was the fact that he had managed to do great things (Alice for example.) Like a lot of my heroes in fact. People like Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame of course), Paul Graham (of Viaweb and Y Combinator fame), Steve Jobs (Apple and NeXT), Richard Branson (Virgin) and countless other creators (like artists and programmers.)

Our world is what it is thanks to inventors and creators. And I’ve realized that most creative people are not working in a university doing research anymore. In his very interesting Why I am Not a Professor or The Decline and Fall of the British University, Mike Tarver writes:

The mandarins in charge of education decreed that research was to be assessed, and that meant counting things. Quite what things and how wasn’t too clear, but the general answer was that the more you wrote, the better you were. So lecturers began scribbling with the frenetic intensity of battery hens on overtime, producing paper after paper […]

[But is] the paper important?  Is it something people will look back on and say ‘That was a landmark’.  Applying this last test requires historical hindsight – not an easy thing.  But when it is applied, very often the list of one hundred papers disappears altogether. Placed under the heat of forensic investigation the list finally evaporates and what you are left with is the empty set.

Mencius Moldbug is more direct in his What’s wrong with [Computer Science] research blog entry:

The reason why [Computer Science] research produces so little that can be called creative programming these days is that the modern process of grant-funded research is fundamentally incompatible with the task of writing interesting, cool and relevant software. Rather, its goal is to produce publications and careers, and it’s very good at that.

Bureaucrats build academic empires which churn out meaningless solutions to irrelevant problems.

And this is what made me realize that I was on the wrong track. I do not want to churn out meaningless solutions to irrelevant problems. I am not (and never will be) a bureaucrat. As from now, I’ll do things.

Thanks Mike and Mencius. Rest in peace, Randy.

Into The Wild

By 8 Comments

I will be succinct: Watch “Into The Wild” as it’s one of the most beautiful and breathtaking movies ever…

For those who have some time, let me tell you that Kyan, Anya, Christina and I watched Into The Wild yesterday and we were mesmerized. Here’s the plot (courtesy of IMDB):

After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gives his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life.

Nothing too fancy. No mafia killer. No special effects. No pounding music. Only a young guy who meets extraordinary (yet apparently “insignificant”) persons while hitchhiking towards Alaska.

At the end of the movie, you’ll really understand what exactly happiness means.

Thanks Sean Penn. You’re a bloody excellent film director.