Snow Leopard: Wrapping Things Up
Posted By Grant on August 29, 2009
I installed Snow Leopard last night before going to bed and then woke up this morning to find a couple of things slightly out of whack. Thought I’d detail my fixes here for any passers-by.
QuickSilver was the first picture in my house of Mac perfection that was a little crooked. It didn’t load at launch, and trying to manually launch it from the Applications folder resulted in… nothing. No dock icon, no menu bar icon… zippo. So I did a google search and found this thread over on Google groups. The solution wasn’t there per se, but it eventually lead me to this fix:
- use AppCleaner to get rid of the old version of QuickSilver and any of its accompanying files and preferences
- download and install version b56a7 of QuickSilver from http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list (it’s a .gz file that will, when double-clicked, extract itself)
After launching QuickSilver and putting my preferences back as they were, everything was fine.
The next thing that had gone awry was the backup process that Time Machine was making to my (admittedly unsupported) NAS. I’d gone through the setup process for unsupported volumes before, but evidently the new Snow Leopard install reverted to Apple-sanctioned backup devices only. Here’s a great article over on Mac OS X Hints on how to backup to a NAS. In short, here’s how I did it:
- in terminal:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 - in terminal:
hdiutil create -size 390g -fs HFS+J -volname “Backup of Lewis-Kitchen-iMac” Lewis-Kitchen-iMac_00224129a054.sparsebundle - created a folder on the NAS to which my Mac has full permissions
- moved the sparsebundle file created in the second step above to the appropriate folder on the NAS
- opened time machine’s preferences and indicated the location for the backups to occur
After a short pause, the backup started.
A couple of notes: First, there were at one time some dire warnings being issued about using unsupported volumes with Time Machine. I believe those kinks were resolved by Apple, but it’s still wise to proceed with care. (Which is better, I ask you: a backup process that might be a little wonky, or no backup at all?) Second, I had to completely delete my pre-Snow sparsebundle file on the NAS before I could proceed. I haven’t tried this same process on my Macbook yet, so perhaps it was a glitch I’ll only experience on the kitchen iMac. I’ll edit this post when I have more information.
The last thing that went away with the Snow Leopard update were some of the settings I’ve made to default applications for certain file types. For instance, my text editor of choice is Text Wrangler. Veteran Mac users will already know how to do this, but to change the default application for a particular file type:
- click on an icon for the file type in question and choose File | Get Info
- in the window that appears, make the appropriate changes under Open with
What are your experiences with installing Snow Leopard?
Associate Professor of Voice at North Greenville University in Tigerville, SC.
[...] My take on the “unsupported network volumes” Time Machine hack Jump to Comments UPDATE: Yep, Snow Leopard has broken my backups, which worked perfectly for 6 months. Initial reports are you just need start from scratch [...]