William Goodall's Blog Occasional mutterings

March 21, 2015

rsync on external drives with OS X sparse bundle images

Filed under: Apple,IT — William_T_Goodall @ 14:38

If you use (encrypted) sparse bundle disk images on Mac OS X and want to be able to keep backups of the images on a different external drive you can use the rsync command to copy/delete only the changed bands making the process very quick.

Assuming you have a sparse bundle disk image called IMAGE at

/Volumes/DRIVE1/images/IMAGE.sparsebundle and you want to back it up to

/Volumes/DRIVE2/backups/IMAGE.sparsebundle

Unmount the images if they are mounted. You will not need the password if the drives are encrypted as the drives are not mounted during the backup.

In the terminal use the following command

rsync -vaE –inplace –delete –progress /Volumes/DRIVE1/images/IMAGE.sparsebundle /Volumes/DRIVE2/backups

editing the command to match your paths and filenames. Note that you do not enter the filename of the destination sparse image, just the folder it is in. (Without trailing ‘/‘). If the destination doesn’t already exist then it will be created but since this involves copying the entire image it will take time. Once the destination image exists only changes are copied across and will be quick.

If the process is interrupted before it completes the destination image may be corrupted. Simply rerunning the command to completion should resolve this.

If you use the hdiutil compact command to free unused space on the source disk image then unused bands will be deleted on the destination image when you sync.

DISCLAIMER. I have successfully used these commands to back up and synchronise several encrypted sparse bundle images between various Firewire and USB3 external drives but if you choose to try this yourself it is your responsibility to ensure that it works correctly for your requirements.

December 11, 2014

Pegler i-Temp

Filed under: DIY,IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 14:01

New heating controllers for the winter. Five TRV heads, a window sensor and a remote control. Discovered a leaky TRV body when installing them so that will need a plumber.

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Installed window sensor using provided double-sided sticky pads.

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May get another remote so I can have one for the office and one for the living room.

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I got a ‘buy three get one free’ deal and got five for the price of four.

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October 3, 2014

USB power

Filed under: iOS,IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 13:32

To power the BL-MP01 wireless access point in the lounge. The previous USB power supply got recalled.

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August 10, 2014

Another New HDD

Filed under: IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 11:06

I now have a 3TB, 4TB and 5TB drive. I imagine this will enable me to move my files around until I have everything backed up and room to put new stuff and a backup in a streamlined way. Once I work it out.

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Anniversary

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 11:03

Twenty years, so I got the wife this.

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July 5, 2014

BL-MP01

Filed under: Apple,iOS,IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 15:15

I got this to provide WiFi downstairs. It plugs into the router attached to the wired ethernet and provides a WiFi point for mobile devices like iPod Touch or iPad.

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The pocket travel bit wasn’t relevant to my needs – it was just the cheapest suitable device I could find at £8.95. It does need a spare USB power supply though as it doesn’t come with one. It does have a USB cable and an ethernet cable.

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I telneted into it and saw Busybox. It didn’t seem to be configurable that way though, I had to get the web interface working on 192.168.16.254 which meant temporarily setting up one Mac on 192.168.16.xxx so I could connect it to the ethernet port and do the settings. It needed a reboot between every setting to get them to stick but it is a once-off. Now it has an SSID and a password of my choosing.

June 25, 2014

New external HDD

Filed under: Apple,IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 14:31

4TB USB 3 drive to reorganise and back up stuff from my 3TB Firewire 800 drive which is nearly full.

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Used to be Hitachi Global Storage Technologies now part of Western Digital. The very similar TOURO DX3 uses the greener 5400 RPM drive.

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TOURO Desk PRO.

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May 19, 2014

Call Saint call blocker

Filed under: Food & Drink,IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 13:52

An Amazon parcel of mixed stuff arrived.

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Two boxes of Indian ready meals, four new Sonicare toothbrush heads and a call blocker.

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The protective film on the screen required duct tape to remove.

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Wiring it up proved surprisingly baffling since I hadn’t had any coffee yet. Blocked WITHHELD and ’00’ prefix (most international) and the last three nuisance numbers still on my caller display memory. I shall add more as they appear.

December 13, 2013

Powerline 200

Filed under: IT,Television,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 21:11

So I was down to three 85mbps Homeplugs again which meant the PVR wasn’t connected any more. Replacing a single 85mbps Homeplug was rather expensive as they are obsolete and it would be even worse the next time one blew. So I bit the bullet and got four new 200mbps Homeplugs. These cost me just about £30 for four including delivery from Amazon.

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Two twin-packs.

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Very compact. I worry about the lack of ventilation given that heat seems to have killed most of my previous 85mbps home plugs but maybe these ones run cooler.

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Instead of having to run a setup program you can just run around pressing the little black reset button in the correct fashion to assign a random encryption to the network. So far so good.

December 11, 2012

Late 2012 iMac

Filed under: Apple,IT — William_T_Goodall @ 21:43

Got my new iMac yesterday evening and set about transferring my data from Time Machine and such.

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Applecare and Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter arrived separately.

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Shipping box.

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Foam pads top and bottom.

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Simply unfolds and lifts out.

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And then some waiting.

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