iTunes Sync Server to Mac

Holidays are a good day to catch up on things you’ve been meaning to do fopr ages. I have all of my music on my Home Server (WHS), but iTunes is dog slow if I try to access the 100Gb of files directly and update anything. So I keep a copy of my music on my MacBook locally (it’s nice to have a backup too, even though it’s mirrored on WHS).

I decided to try out a folder sync app, Sykron, which is cross platform. In summary, it works very nicely and I’d recommend it, my WHS and Mac folders are now in sync, and I’ll probably set it up to automatically sync too, so that any music added to the server gets added to the Mac too, and any artwork/genre etc updates will get sync’d back to WHS.

However, to automatically add music to iTunes when it gets sync’d? For this, go to Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes and add the folder update

Next problem, how to deal with moves and renames so they don’t duplicate…

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Snow Leopard BootCamp Backup and Saving vhd’s

Looked around for some recommendations and found WinClone for OSX, looks like it does a nice job of backing up a BootCamp partition under OSX, I’ll also see if VMware Fusion has got better at handling the BootCamp partition.

I’m also planning to install the beta of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 to test to see if it solves the BSD on Hyper-V on my Dell 1747. I boot my WS2008 install from VHD, so first step (after the crash last time…) is to create a rar archive of the VHD (11Gb VHD shrunk to 5Gb) before I apply the beta – I’ll also be able to revert to a ‘clean’ install if I want to upgrade to production too.

© John Edwards 2010 MicroScotland Ltd http://www.microscotland.com

Why you should backup, and how…

Time Machine

For many years I used Time Machine to backup my MacBook Pro and never had a problem (although it was a great resource when I upgraded my hard drive), but I recently re-assigned my 500Gb USB disk to my Dell Laptop and didn’t reconnect it to the Mac, bad move…

After installing a few apps and drivers, and after around 2 years with the base install, my Mac started slowing down yesterday, and ultimately failed to boot OSX, though it would still boot my Bootcamp XP (new install) environment. This morning, I decided to flatten OSX and tried to back up my XP install, it failed to boot too. Very symptomatic of a duff 500Gb HD, so I’ve reinstalled a spare 160Gb laptop SATA drive and am currently re-installing OSX Snow Leopard.

I will do a Time Machine backup and then try out the 500Gb disk again – it’s maybe just worked too hard…in this case I’ll do a TM restore to save the OSX install time.

Another useful activity I think will be to prep a USB stick as a bootable Snow Leopard installer

Once I’ve reinstalled XP in my Bootcamp environment I’ll connect that to Windows Home Server vail and backup, then maybe even try a restore.

Mac Audio Routing – sucks?

Seems like I can’t simply route the output of my TuneStudio to my MacBook speakers, seems mildly rubssih. Will try out Soundflower to see if it doesn’t suck.

© John Edwards 2010 MicroScotland Ltd http://www.microscotland.com