Preston did a great job of talking about the difference between Outage vs Outrage. It usually comes down to one letter.
I like Time Machine, and I like the way Howard explains Apple concepts in his blog posts, so this article “How does Time Machine make a backup?” really hit the spot.
My friend Vincent has made it to 100,000 hits on his blog, and I really hope he gets a lot more. He’s a smart chap.
Welcome to Random Short take #64. It’s the start of the last month of the year. We’re almost there.
Want to read an article that’s both funny and informative? Look no further than this beginner’s guide to subnetting. I did Elizabethan literature at uni, so it was good to get a reminder on Shakespeare’s involvement in IP addressing.
On a more serious note, data hoarding is a problem (I know this because I’ve been guilty of it), and this article from Preston outlines some of the reasons why it can be a bad thing for business.
Still on data protection, Howard Oakley looks at checking the integrity of Time Machine backups in this post. I’ve probably mentioned this a few times previously, but if you find macOS behaviour baffling at times, Howard likely has an article that can explain why you’re seeing what you’re seeing.
Zerto recently announced Zerto In-Cloud for AWS – you read more about that here. Zerto is really starting to put together a comprehensive suite of DR solutions. Worth checking out.
Leaseweb Global is also doing stuff with Google Cloud – you can read more about that here.
Finally, this article over at Blocks and Files on what constitutes a startup made for some interesting reading. Some companies truly are Peter Pans at this point, whilst others are holding on to the idea that they’re still in startup mode.
VMworld is on this week. I still find the virtual format (and timezones) challenging, and I miss the hallway track and the jet lag. There’s nonetheless some good news coming out of the event. One thing that was announced prior to the event was Tanzu Community Edition. William Lam talks more about that here.
Speaking of VMworld news, Viktor provided a great summary on the various “projects” being announced. You can read more here.
I’ve been a Mac user for a long time, and there’s stuff I’m learning every week via Howard Oakley’s blog. Check out this article covering the Recovery Partition. While I’m at it, this presentation he did on Time Machine is also pretty ace.
Facebook had a little problem this week, and the Cloudflare folks have provided a decent overview of what happened. As someone who works for a service provider, this kind of stuff makes me twitchy.
Fibre Channel? Cloud? Chalk and cheese? Maybe. Read Chin-Fah’s article for some more insights. Personally, I miss working with FC, but I don’t miss the arguing I had to do with systems and networks people when it came to the correct feeding and watering of FC environments.
Remote working has been a challenge for many organisations, with some managers not understanding that their workers weren’t just watching streaming video all day, but actually being more productive. Not everything needs to be a video call, however, and this post / presentation has a lot of great tips on what does and doesn’t work with distributed teams.
I’ve had to ask this question before. And Jase has apparently had to answer it too, so he’s posted an article on vSAN and external storage here.
This is the best response to a trio of questions I’ve read in some time.
So I now know too much about how to recover old files from iPad backups. I know this isn’t exactly my bread and butter, but I found the process fascinating, and thought it was worth documenting the process here. It all started when I upgraded my wife’s iPad 2 to iOS 8. Bad idea. Basically, it ran like rubbish and was pretty close to unusable. So I rolled it back, using the instructions here. Ok, so that’s cool, but it turns out I can’t restore the data from a backup because that was made with iOS 8 and wasn’t compatible with iOS 7.1.2. Okay, fine, it was probably time to clear out some apps, and all of the photos were saved on the desktop, so no big deal. Fast forward a few days, and we realise that all of her notes were on that device. Now for the fun bit. Note that I’m using a Mac. No idea what you need to do on a Windows machine, but I imagine it’s not too dissimilar.
Step 1. Recover the iPad backup from before the iOS upgrade using Time Machine. Note that you’ll need to be able to see hidden files in Finder, as the backup is stored under HOME/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup and Time Machine uses Finder’s settings for file visibility. I used these instructions. Basically, fire up a terminal and type:
$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE$ killall Finder
You’ll then see the files you need with Time Machine. When you’re finished, type:
$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE$ killall Finder
Step 2. Now you can browse to HOME/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup and recover your backup files. If you have more than one iDevice backed up, you might need to dig a bit through the files to recover the correct files. I used these instructions to locate the correct backup files. You’ll want to look for a file called “Info.plist”. In that file, you’ll see something like
<key>Device Name</key><string>My iPhone</string>
And from there you can restore the correct files. It will look something like this when recovered:
Step 3. Now you’ll want to go to the normal location of your iPad backups and rename your current backup to something else. Then copy the files that you recovered from Time Machine to this location.
Step 4. At this point, I followed these quite excellent instructions from Chris Taylor and used the pretty neat iPhone Backup Extractor to extract the files I needed. Once you’ve extracted the files, you’ll have something like this. Note the path of the files is iOS Files/Library/Notes.
Step 5. At this point, fire up MesaSQLite and open up the “notes.sqlite” file as per the instructions on Chris’s post. Fantastic, I’ve got access to the text from the notes. Except they have a bunch of html tags in them and are generally unformatted. Well, I’m pretty lazy, so I used the tool at Web 2.0 Generators to decode the html to formatted text for insertion into Notes.app files. And that’s it.
Conclusion. As it happens, I’ve now set this iPad up with iCloud synchronisation. *Theoretically* I won’t need to do this again. Nor should I have had to do it in the first place. But I’ve never come across an update that was quite so ugly on particular iDevices. Thanks to Apple for the learning opportunity.
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