Copying 2TB despite a dinosaur that shoot lasers from its eye

Of course, I could copy 2TB of files with the 32-bit Carbon version of Finder without any worries, but Apple’s 64-bit Cocoa rewrite of Finder paid off, and it still makes me happy I bought a Mac.

Back when I was a Windows user, copying nearly 2TB of files was a hell. Explorer would fail somewhere in the middle, and I’d have to see where it left off and resume manually. Finder is a solid file manager. I knew about Win32 copy apps such as Xcopy, but OSX comes with a solid app to do what you need replacements for on Windows (Teracopy, for instance).

Personally, I love having the ability to run both Webkit and Safari simultaneously. Webkit downloads daily updates, a small annoyance every day for having two browsers running in their own processes. Firefox feels slow once you start adding plug-ins and extensions into it. I believe Chrome has a great idea, running each tab and window in a separate process. Since Firefox of whichever versions runs as one process, it becomes sluggish even when on a multi-core Xeon there is plenty of free CPU and RAM. Sadly, not even the bookmark manager works in the Mac OSX Chrome dev builds yet.

The beauty of Weave is that as opposed to FBRE backups or Xmarks, it is a Mozilla created project and is compatible with bleeding edge versions of Firefox. That means that all of the same bookmarks and passwords are seamlessly synchronized between the two. With one account, no exporting/importing your files constantly.

On a side note, Xmarks promises to work with Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. I thought about synchronizing all of my bookmarks, but that is what my delicious account is for. In addition, there appear to be downsides to installing the Safari extension. Currently there are very few plugins available for Safari that will run in 64-bit mode. Safari and Webkit are amazing enough that I don’t mind not having ad blocking installed. Plus, I’m using Allbookmarks (free) to show me all of my bookmarks for every browser. The Firefox plugin does add some neat features, but it is bloated for this purpose.

Anyways, how to run Minefield and Firefox simultaneously on your Mac easily!

First, install the Mozilla Weave plugin and setup an account. Synchronize your bookmarks and passwords.

Use Finder or Spotlight and open up Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/

Paste this into Terminal and hit enter: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin  -Profilemanager

Create a second profile. I just called mine “Minefield” for simplicity. Profilemanager help page.

Once your second profile is created, start with your default so your regular Firefox.app will continue to use it. Retry the Terminal command if you are taken into the Minefield profile instead, as you will be able to just re-select the default again.

Download a Minefield nightly build

Mount the .dmg & drag to your Applications folder.

There are more than two ways of running Minefield with the new profile. You simply need to setup an easy way to pass command line arguments to its firefox-bin. Here is how to do it in Automator, although Script Editor from this  MacOSXHints page could be superior. Just depends on how much time you want to spend on it. I’ll assume if prefer Script Editor, I don’t need to explain anything to you

Use Finder and open Automator.app in /Applications/

Select new Workflow and simply select from the Library > Utilities > Run Shell Script

Here you can paste in /Applications/Minefield.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P Minefield &

(Replace the Minefield after -P for Profile with whatever name you called the new Profile.) I should mention that I have my Terminal.app default settings set to close the shell if it exits cleanly. This is a simple preference in Terminal.app that will prevent a window from staying open after passing the arguments to Minefield.

Now all you have to do is save the Automator action as an Application into /Applications. You can even give it the Minefield icon. This is basically just a shortcut to run Minefield with a different profile without using the command line.

Install Mozilla Weave, synchronize, and enjoy having a Firefox with loads of speed and a Firefox with loads of features.

I was rather surprised that Microsoft actually made a client for Windows Live Mesh for Mac OSX Snow Leopard! This is especially surprising since Ubuntu One is Ubuntu only. At least Dropbox lets me synchronize across all platforms. Previously I was using MacFUSE/FUSE Userland sshfs mounting for my Dreamhost backup space.

2GB Free – Dropbox – Mac OSX, Linux, Windows

5GB Free – Windows Live Mesh – Windows & Mac OSX, however the icon stays in the dock which is rather annoying. The menubar icon is the control for Mesh, so the dock icon is extraneous.

2GB Free – Ubuntu One – Ubuntu only, but integrated with Ubuntu 9.10+’s file manager. Since I was reformatting my laptop quite often to try new variants, this let me save important things such as bookmarks or how to get the proprietary Nvidia drivers to work with the Xorg.conf.

I recommend Dropbox because it works on the three platforms I use the most and is often easier than setting up a shared folder on the network.

These show up either with period, or as a hex number beginning with a : with netatalk, which allows a faster and more native sharing of APF over TCP. With FTP or SMB servers, you can ignore or veto the creation of these files.  A way to avoid copying resource forks & metadata to network shares, you can try this hint to disable it as a finder preference.

It seems like nobody has ever discovered that the Darwin OSX man page for the terminal command “cp”, which is used to copy a file or directory recursively, has built a SIMPLE parameter to completely skip any of these!

First, I mounted my network share, which is just called rayray using Finder’s Connect To Server menu item. This put rayray in /Volumes/rayray Then I can run cp with the -X parameter!

cp -vRX /path/to/folder /Volumes/rayray

This will show each file as it is copied and happily it goes *fast* and skips all of those files!

By the way, I still have to test NFS’s speed, but with netatalk using Appletalk over TCP Apple File Transfers, I get 50-60MB/s over a gigabit crossover cable as opposed to 30-35MB/s with Samba. Kinda neat

I want to point out that this person’s blog was the most helpful resource to getting Avahi-Daemon to advertise exactly what I wanted, so if you’re setting up a Linux server on your network with services that you want to appear in Finder, Terminal, and other places automagically, check out HolyArmy.org