I HATE APPLE

Out the window then

lol so i took ed's suggestion and DLed GrandPerspective:

https://i.imgur.com/VzlQdKW.png

the big red square in the bottom right is backblaze

ii: ilxor tips on what i can clear out of ancient garbage which cleanmymac™ fails to dig out
― mark s, Saturday, April 25, 2020 9:52 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Have you ever used OnyX? It probably won't help much with visualizing your HD space to delete junk from your HD, but I think it does a good job of cleaning out the cobwebs (and, once you've run through a few of their recommended sweeps, ends up deleting 5-10gb of HD junk that you probably would never have felt comfortable deleting. I'm using a Late 2008 Macbook running El Capitan, and I feel like OnyX has helped keep everything running smoothly (probably run it whenever things start getting unstable, prob about once a year, and it usually helps).

will try thk u

Has backblaze finished its backup?

i thought i could catch it on a brief pause in its endless backing up and tried to answer yr question but of course it started backing up again, it's p much always backing up

the schedule ive given it is "start at 22.oo end at 8.oo" (ie overnight when i am sleeping and/or worrying) but it does not seem to respect this schedule

How much work are you doing? It should take a week or two to back everything up. After that it’s just incremental. Are you not letting it finish the initial backup?

the initial back-up took place a long long time ago (some years ago) and yes i think to 6-8 days i forget now, the "just incremental" element is constant if not quite non-stop

don't really know how to answer "how much work are you doing" -- i'm a writer and an editor so i'm working all day daily on documents in word and/or scrivener but i can't imagine this is creating enough vast new material in itself to justify the amount of incremental backup apparently required, even if a doc is like 200,000 words or whatever

i mean i am quite likely doing something wrong and dumb! but it is not evident to me what it is (beyond having way too much stuff on my laptop but that's kind of a different issue, the vast bulk of it is entirely unchanging)

if backup software is constantly chugging memory all the time, isn't that... wrong?

this is my feeling yes

Mark, the chugging may have its own bad causes but it does suggest that you've got a spinning HD rather than an SSD. If you wanted to switch to the latter for a big leap in performance I can recommend a friend who is a whizz at Macs and works locally - he could do the job for you as he did for me and gave my MacBook a huge new lease of life a few years ago. I do keep AV stuff on an extetnal HD though as those files take up too much room for an affordable SSD.

He's Pablo at http://applecoreservices.com

yeah. I have a 9-year-old computer on BB and I've never noticed it actually doing its thing. Every now and again I check the logs and it is actually backing up overnight. I think I have mine set to 2am-6am but it generally only spends about 15 minutes backing up.

I would say reinstall and start the whole backup from scratch. If that's possible. Something must be corrupted somewhere - not what you want in a backup!

Upgrading to an SSD would be a great move regardless!

All this agita about online backups has me thinking maybe it would be easier to just plug in a drive

doesn't help with robbery, a flood, etc (though mark does live in the top floor so flooding probably not high on the risk register)

biggest win potentially here is mark dispensing with reliance on the jackass of hackney road

yes

I’m dealing with gigabytes if data. Huge audio files, image files etc. I have a 2017 iMac with a 4 drive enclosure, all backed up via backblaze and I notice no problems at all. I also have a cheap huge WD drive on my desktop for time machine.

If you’re not working off an SSD that’s your first problem. Then if you system drive doesn’t have TONS of free space that’s the second. Get stuff off that drive. External hard drives are cheap. Thumb drives are cheap.

If those two things don’t fix your problems something’s buggy and you should be nagging backblaze support.

ok

Just as a point of reference, my equivalent block of Backblaze was only 631MB, NB I have very fast internet upstream so my initially backup only took a few hours and I almost never see Backblaze at work.

I put a ssd in an imac a few years ago and it was great until the last update didn’t play well with the upgrade. It’s glitchy and I have to research how to fix it.

It's so messed up that the only Macs that aren't thermally limited are either (1) $7k+ (2) built-in everything, including the screen.

Thermally limited ?

processor throttling afaict

most aren’t that limited and, I would argue, opting in to limiting for battery life should be an option

Yeah it throttles down CPU speed when it gets too hot. Conventional wisdom has it that this is an issue for Macbook Pros and Mac Minis but maybe the Mini at least has gotten better? Better enough to run Witcher 3 with an eGPU in Bootcamp though? eh? eh?

update on my backblaze issues: since i switched to "backup now" as my option to decide ive had 0 problems with the return of the spinny disc -- will follow up on SSD as advised at some future point (like when i can get a bus to this guy's workplace and not a 4-hr round walk lol)

i also found some more space just via deleting attachments in mail which had built up since i last had a clear-out and will maybe try OnyX at some point also to really get into the dusty nooks and crannies

If you mean my friend Pablo he says he does pickups.

oh does he? i didn't see that on his site -- i need to send off the query anyway (since cost is also an issue given i have 0 work currently)

get me work alba

I guess he doesn't promise it on his site as he doesn't want to be racing across London to trace an iPhone battery but this i world be a bigger job and his mum still lives in Hackney so I guess he's there quite a lot!

Yeah I think the cost of an SSD is worth it but not inconsiderable if you're out of work :/

Replace not trace, he's not a spy

the spy is you doxxing his mum :D

anyway thx yes, i will pursue this

SSD prices have dropped a lot just in the past year. you can get 1TB for about a hundred quid.

Oh that's good. Yeah I think it was about twice that when I got mine.

They’re also easy to install depending on your computer. Hi to OWC and buy the drive and they’ll send you the tools and a link to a video.

Ah yeah - by all means give that a go. I wasn't brave enough to do it myself.

while tidying up i happened to look a little bit more carefully at the packaging for my replacement laptop battery and i'm pleased to say the warning on the side says "Risk of fire or bum if mishandled"

i: do backblaze fans know any ways to dial down its space hogging
ii: ilxor tips on what i can clear out of ancient garbage which cleanmymac™ fails to dig out

― mark s, Saturday, April 25, 2020 2:52 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

mark i've logged several tasks to BB about the space hogging (which I can see from my periodic GrandPerspective scans. they repeatedly send a pre-prepared blurb that doesn't quite answer the problem - so why have i got a 15gb BB block just sitting there when I'm all backed up? In the end I bought a 1TB SSD and it's all good now because I'm not close to the edge storage wise. BB is good, but it's not always that good.

re BB: i back up by choice now, once a day if i remember over night, which means less spinny disc while i'm working

sevdral times since i installed the new battery the whole thing has just turned itself off while sitting there -- as far as i can interpret the report it's bcz it's overheating? might a new battery cause this?

also chrome now keeps falling over (i think it maybe failed to update properly for some reason and is stuck in some flimsy in-between state -- maybe i shd reinstall?) (will i lose all my lovely bookmarks if i do?)

i still haven't contacted tracer's new guy to find out about the upgrade, if it keeps misbehaving i will

it's Alba's guy! which speaks even better of him :)

check the power manager / energy saver settings mark

this isn't powering down tidily while at rest, this is blinking out abruptly mid-move* and when i restart giving me a warning message and a bunch of coding crap to send to apple

*not a move i'm directly making though, it hasn't ever done it while i'm working on it, only when i'm not looking

If you're worried about Chrome losing your bookmarks when you reinstall it you can export them all first and then import again if needed. The place to do this is a bit hidden but I'm sure if you Google there are instructions. I make that backup every so often anyway just in case.

Also, if you're logged into Chrome and have our set up to sync your bookmarks (this may be the default these days) then they all get saved in the cloud anyway so even if you log into Chrome on a completely new computer the bookmarks magically appear.

Our = it

cheers alba and everyone, sorry i am very demotivated and self-loathingly ground under at the moment, caught between "of course this shd all be perfectly easy for me to research and grasp" and "please can i clear all this toss out of my head and have interesting stuff back in there, as a treat"

no this sounds like some bad juju mark. i really think you should get Alba’s guy to give the whole thing a once-over, get BB working right, and quote you for an SSD. like a bike tune-up sort of.

ok so i reinstalled chrome w/o incident

(or only dumb incident, i didn't lost any of my lovely/stupid bookmark but it subtly reordered them so that the ones i use most were hidden out beyond the double expansion arrows)

no this sounds like some bad juju mark. i really think you should get Alba’s guy to give the whole thing a once-over, get BB working right, and quote you for an SSD. like a bike tune-up sort of.

yeah mark ssds are magical