End of Year Time Machine Cleanup
During the Holiday break I decided to do a little computer file cleanup. I noticed that the size of my Time Machine backup had grown quite large (Approx 850 GB). That’s right, 850 GB. I decided I didn’t that many backups and proceeded to delete nearly all of the backup files save a few key ones. I then noticed that the .sparsebundle that is my backup was still reporting a file size of 850 GB. After doing a little google searching I found that this is common. I also found a way to manually compact the sparsebundle to reclaim some of that unused space. The trick was to use The Terminal.
Helpful Links:
- http://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive/index.php/t-84284.html
- http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-783907.html
Here is what I did since my backup has spaces in the filename.
- Launch Terminal
- cd /Volumes
- sudo -s
- ls (to view the Volumes)
- cd “Time Capsule Disk” (I had to include the quotes)
- hdiutil compact *.sparsebundle
If all goes according to plan, you should see the following messages:
Starting to compact…
Reclaiming free space
……………………………………
Finishing compaction…
Reclaimed xxx.x GB out of xxx.x GB possible
I reclaimed 507.5 GB!!! Your results may vary.
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Copy changed files
This little tool isn’t for everyone, but someday you might have a need to compare files in two directories and only grab the changes. This is one of those tools that can be so handy in just the right situation. I’m thinking of using it for incremental backups as described on the examples page.
Superbar for windows system monitoring
Windows 7: If you like visual indicators for things like disk capacity, battery life, memory usage, and speaker volume, and you like them prominent and easy to find, SuperbarMonitor puts easy to read indicators right on your Superbar.
http://lifehacker.com/5488717/superbarmonitor-puts-system-monitoring-right-on-your-windows-superbar
Clean up your Mac’s “open with” contextual menu
I stumbled upon this short Lifehacker article about how to clean up duplicate apps listed in the “open with…” contextual menu. It caught my eye because I was just wondering how to clean this up on my Macbook Pro. I have installed Photoshop and then later upgraded so there are now two “photoshop” options listed. Looks like the solution is to rebuild your Mac’s LaunchServices database with the following terminal command.
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/
LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user