Category Archives: Leopard
Time Machine Exclusions – Snow Leopard
A bit late, but here’s an update of the Time Machine exclusion list for Snow Leopard.
Time Machine: Switching Computers
My main Mac is out of service for a few days as the screen gets replaced, so I performed a Time Machine restore onto another computer to use in the meantime. I’ll let this computer continue backing up to the same time machine volume, then do a TM restore back onto my main machine when it’s fixed. On the temporary machine, Time Machine didn’t want to continue backing up to the same backup folder. From Time Machine’s perspective, this is … Continue reading
Key Value Observing Improvements v1.2
Hot on the heels of the 1.1 bug fix release comes version a freshly rewritten 1.2 with API cleanup, bug fixes, and a great new feature. Lately, I’ve been using observers to allow an object to observe changes to its own properties. This means I don’t have to override the setter method (I’m using synthesized properties) and the observation is managed the same way that it would be externally. The current KVO implementation (at least, in non-GC land,) however, doesn’t … Continue reading
Leopard CGWindowList* APIs
Leopard brings new APIs at the CoreGraphics layer to gather information about windows on the system. These functions let you find windows relative to a known window, find all windows on the system, including those offscreen, and obtain images of one or more windows as composited by the Window Server. However, these API’s have an interesting peculiarity: when the documentation says “a CFArray of CGWindowID values” they mean a CFArray of uint32s, not CFNumbers as programmers familiar with CoreFoundation might … Continue reading
Time Machine Menu
The Time Machine application, when in the dock, enables access to functions for showing Time Machine, backing up now, stopping an existing backup, browsing other Time Machine disks and showing Time Machine preferences. If you’re like me, you’d like access to these features without the app in the dock; unfortunately, you can’t — by default. I’ve done a bit of digging and was able to implement all but one of these features in a menu extra. Download it and the … Continue reading
Time Machine Exclusions
So Time Machine is a pretty convenient way to backup your machine, and I use it to backup my laptop to an external FireWire drive. Although Time Machine backs up the “whole system,” I assumed there had to be some exclusions, such as cache files or /dev, for example. After a short bit of digging, I discovered that these paths are specified in a standard property list at /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist The full list is some 57 items, and is available below. … Continue reading