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Prevent disk auto-mount while logged in

While there are numerous well-documented ways to prevent a hard disk or USB drive from mounting at boot-time, I found only one way (working in 10.6) to prevent newly-connected disks from auto-mounting...

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Disk Utility may not warn of a failing hard drive

While Apple's bundled Disk Utility application reports a hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. status, the information might not be correct. If you care about the information stored on a hard drive that is connected...

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How to fix a Time Machine hangup

Time Machine, while it does have a very usable interface, is inclined to get stuck sometimes. Occasionally Time Machine seems to be stuck, but isn't really. When you first do a backup, or when you...

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RAID volumes not appearing in Disk Utility

I recently had a disk problem where RAID Utility said the disks and volumes were all fine but the volumes were simply absent in Disk Utility. I was at a total loss for what to do, since the system...

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Offsite daily encrypted backup via Dropbox

Using some shell scripting + crontab + Dropbox, I've created a method for doing a daily encrypted backup of folders, lasting for 31 days. Why bother? It's important to back up data because eventually...

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Transfer a Time Machine volume to a larger disk

Transferring a Time Machine backup to a larger disk can be challenging, as a simple file copy operation in the Finder does not work. The entire volume has to be transferred in one piece, sector by...

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Prevent SSD wear by using a RAM disk for cache

Installing a new OCZ Vertex II SSD in an old 2006 iMac really speeds things up (and is documented in photos here). However, I was searching for ways to limit the wear of my SSD (since each cell has a...

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Use GParted LiveCD to recover missing partition

My Macintosh HD startup disk disappeared today, but I was able to use GParted to delete a small partition from the drive and the missing disk reappeared. Boot Camp Assistant got me into this hot water...

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How to share TrueCrypted drive for OSX and Linux with write perms

Let's say you have hard drive encrypted with TrueCrypt with HFS+ filesystem on it and you want to use it under both: OSX and Linux. That's no problem because TrueCrypt works great on both systems. But...

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Extra photo and video storage for iPad

This hint requires the Apple Camera Connection Kit and some SD cards. You may find it useful for all sorts of reasons to have extra storage space available on your iPad. In my case as a regular...

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Fix SSD slow boot times

If you've just upgraded from a disk drive to a solid-state disk, booting from reset should take about 15 seconds, logging in should take about 5 seconds, and applications should launch about three to...

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Make a dual-partitioned HFS+/FAT32 drive play nice with Windows

This may be evident to some people, but I was a little surprised that my first attempt at it failed. If you ever want to divide a drive into two partitions, one formatted as Mac OS Extended (HFS+) and...

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Miniguide to fixing Volume-Filesystem errors

There are many drive/filesystem errors that can occur on a Mac. Here are some common symptoms that are indicative of some of them: Not able to boot the system: You tried to boot. Apple logo appeared,...

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Maintaining a Dynamic DNS automatically.

Dynamic DNS services provide you with a domain name you can use with a non-static IP address, like most home computers have. To use these requires some action to periodically contact the DNS server and...

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Re-using your Macbook Air 10.6 recovery USB drive

With the arrival of Lion, you might be stuck with a recovery USB drive that came with your Snow Leopard pre-installed Macbook Air. Seeing as these are slick little gadgets, it might be nice to use them...

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Checking Very Large Time Machine Volumes

Checking very large disk volumes with Disk Utility, especially Time Machine backup disks, can be painfully slow, taking many hours to complete, if it completes at all. This Terminal script vastly...

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Apparent fix for SD cards repeatedly unmounting, remounting

I had a problem with my MacBook Pro repeatedly unmounting and remounting SD cards. Fixing permissions and restarting didn't help. Rebooting once into Safe Mode (shut down, power up and press and hold...

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Easy way to 'trim' an SSD

It looks like a simple Disk Repair will trim an SSD. I got a new SSD and so I booted from a tertiary drive to clone my old SSD onto my new SSD. After the clone I ran Repair Disk and noticed at the end...

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Mount and unmount external drives easily via AppleScript

I like to eject my external drives because they slow down my mac when they spin up, but I want to have an easy way to access them if I need to. I wrote a little AppleScript that will toggle the mount...

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Create a Fusion Drive with a Recovery Partition

There are many step-by-step guides on the internet that explain how to add an SSD to an existing Mac, and create a 'Fusion Drive' that has the speed of an SSD, but also the capacity of a Hard Drive....

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