Time Machine has Slow Backups and Slows down the CPU

This isn't really a FCP tip per se, but I was editing -doing a favor which is another way to spell free- at someone's home recently helping them with a project and noticed after a while that their Time Machine back ups were taking forever; it seemed to be constantly running. It was using a bit of CPU and really thrashing a connected drive.

I checked the Console (Applications > Utilities > Console) and typed in "Starting standard backup" into the search box and looked at the times Time Machine had been running. Looking at the times between "Backup completed successfully" and "Starting standard backup" I saw that backups were taking near 50mins, meaning that Time Machine wasn't grinding away for only 10mins every hour.

I looked around a little bit and one thing to try to fix this, other than just turning it off as it's a problem from 10.6.x all the way to 10.8.x, is to perform a Safe Boot.

1. Reboot the Mac
2. Right after the Startup Chime (Bong noise) hold down the SHIFT key, this is called a Safe Boot
3. Wait for a while. You may see not only an Apple logo on the screen above a "Gear" wheel but below that you may see a progress bar as well. Keep holding down the SHIFT key
4. When it finishes booting (and log in if it asks you to) wait for it to settle down, don't launch any apps, then Reboot. This time don't hold down the SHIFT key.
5. Wait for Time Machine to run again or force it to run by selecting it from the menubar and selecting "Back Up Now"

In a backup or two you should see back ups moving along much faster. There's some complicated stuff going on here with UUID's and Deep Traversal but this is one quick thing to try to solve it before you delve into deleting backups or using another drive (which people often think fixes it but just starts a new backup which you could get by formatting your current Time Machine drive) or running repair utilities.

This process is for if you have a Time Machine back up drive directly connected to a Mac. I'm not sure how well or if at all, this would help a slow network backup.

Can't Empty Trash Error Code -8003

Several times now I've installed Box.com's BoxSync app only to find out after it's installed that I cannot empty the trash. I use Box.com a lot for clients and turns out they're using it more and more but Box.com's installer needs some work and I've emailed them a few times to let them know with not results.

What happens is you install the app, toss the installer into the trash and hit Empty Trash or your favorite key combo (mine is COMMAND + SHIFT + OPTION +DELETE) and the Mac yells at you about how it can't do that and tosses up an error code of -8003.

Rebooting then emptying the trash doesn't help.
Holding down option when you empty trash (see key combo above) doesn't work.
Trying to securely empty trash doesn't work.

What I've had to do a handful of times now on different Macs with different versions of the OS installed to delete BoxSync (this applies to anything that refuses to be deleted) is this:

1. Launch the Terminal
2. Type EXACTLY and without quotes "cd .Trash" hit return.
3. Type EXACTLY and without quotes "ls -al" hit return and see all the stuff that's in the trash.
4. After you confirm what you want to delete is in the trash type EXACTLY and without quotes "rm " that's lower case rm and a space(bar), then type the first letter, paying attention to capitalization of the file and tap TAB to auto complete it. This is for FILES not folders or packages!
5. Hit return and it should be gone.

If it's a package like Box Sync Installer is then step 4 is slightly different. Type EXACTLY and without quotes "rm -rf " thats lower case rm a space(bar) a dash and lower case rf then another space(bar). Then type a capital B and tap TAB to auto complete it. It should look like this:

rm - rf Box\ Sync\ Installer.app/

Hit return and it should be gone. Finally.

TECHNICAL STUFF:

If you really want to find the offending file and don't have a ton of stuff in the trash you can move items back where they were, meaning back on the same volume, drive, folder or whatever, just not in the Trash. I put stuff from one drive into a new temp folder I name "TRASH THIS!" so they're not loose all over the place on that drive.

Then put them in the trash and delete them one by one. Eventually you'll hit a folder or file that won't delete. Recently I had a file that was actually a package that wouldn't delete and tossed up the -8003 error.

Here's what I did once I found the file that refused to be deleted.

- Launch the Terminal

- Type "cd" space-bar then drag the folder that has that file into the terminal, it'll fill out the path then hit Return.

- Type "ls -al" to list the files. (If you want to get fancy type "ls -FaGlh" for a nicer looking file list in the Terminal)

- Type this EXACTLY, "rm" space-bar, then the first letter of the file that won't delete, then the Tab key. Hitting the Tab key will fill out the rest of the file name saving you from typing or worse, mistyping it.

EXAMPLE:

If the file is called roughcut.mov type "rm" hit the spacebar and type "r" then Tab key. The Terminal will show something like:

rm folder/roughcut.mov

Hit Return and it should delete the file.

If it's a folder, from inside the folder that folder is in (see "cd" above) it's in, add a -rvf to the command. This will show you all the things it's deleting.

-r will delete folders and their contents
-v shows you all the stuff it's deleting
-f tells the rm command to ignore files that aren't really there

If you want to confirm every file before it's deleted I think you can add an "i" to the string of switches like "-rvfi"

Careful with all this, using the rm command can seriously ruin your day if you're not careful. To read more about rm type this into the Terminal and hit enter:

man rm

Hard Drives Wake Up and Spin Up For No Good Reason

With Mac OS X sometimes hard drives that are attached will spin up for no reason, when open/save dialogs appear, when quitting an application or when unmounting a .DMG.

Here's a little tip to reduce some of this, mainly the completely random wakings/Spin Ups.

It involves a little Terminal magic but it's not too bad.

Locking (Protecting) P2 Cards Before Ingesting

We've been having a problem with one of our P2 cards here on location which may warrant it's own post in the near future but one suggestion I've been reading about (and talking to friends, thanks, you know who you are) is that it's generally good practice to Lock your P2 cards before you mount them on your Mac.

Why?

I've been told that the Mac will write files to the P2 card upon mounting in the Finder so I decided to find out. Here's what I did to test:

1. With the camera not connected to the Mac format a P2 card.
2. Shoot a test clip.
3. Turn off the camera.
4. Switch the Lock switch on the P2 card to PROTECT.
5. Turn on the camera and mount the P2 card on the Mac.
6. Fire up the Terminal and type in (with out quotes) "cd" hit space bar then drag the icon of the NO NAME P2 card to the Terminal and hit Return to Change Directory to the P2 card.

Your Terminal should read something like this: cd /Volumes/NO\ NAME

7. Type "ls -a" which lists all, including hidden files.
8. You should something like this:

.
..
CONTENTS
LASTCLIP.TXT

Ok, cool, so with the Write Protect tab ON that's what's on the card from the camera untouched by the Mac.

Let's try it with the Write Protect tab set to OFF.

Just mount the card like you normally would but leave Write Protect off. Now, with the unlocked card mounted run the Terminal steps again. After "ls -a" you'll see:

.
..
.Spotlight-V100
._.Trashes
.Trashes
.fseventsd
CONTENTS
LASTCLIP.TXT

So there you have it. The Finder WILL write to a mounted P2 card without you having to do anything. Has that caused a problem for me in the past for the thousands of cards I've loaded in in my life? No, but the possibility is there that the Panasonic camera may not like the files that are on the card after mounting.

My new rule of thumb is to lock the cards before mounting them in the Finder…just in case.

Error Code -50

Sometimes you'll run across this handy error message while trying to copy something to a drive. I have no idea what it means. But I do know that the Finder thinks the drive is still in use by something when in reality it's not.

- lsof | grep in the terminal reveals nothing.
- Using an app like WhatsOpen reveals nothing.
- Relaunching the Finder doesn't help.
- Repairing the drive with Disk Utility won't work because...
- You can't eject the drive.

You have two options in my experience.

A. Force Eject the drive.
B. Restart.

Ejecting Hard Drives

Would it be so difficult for the Finder to let us know which drive's cord was tripped over at a live event?

It couldn't be that hard to just name the volume that vanished right?

Get Info vs Movie Inspector

Ever notice that sometimes the file size shown in QuickTime's "Movie Inspector" window and the Finder's "Get Info" window are different for the same file?

There's probably some good reason.

Two Help Menus or more

If you're seeing two or more help menus in an app or two the prevailing theory is that it's caused by the DivX extension somehow. Although not everyone is seeing this errant behavior.

I'm not seeing it on any machine here and some people report that they have multiple help menus even without DivX installed. I dunno. I wasn't aware of it until I received a few emails about it.

The Finder's Clipboard & FCP's Clipboard

Here's something I just noticed.

When you have something copied to the clipboard from within FCP (at least with Snow Leopard) then you go to say, TextEdit and copy some text you'll have two different things in your clipboard.

If you goto TextEdit (or any text editor) you'll paste the text, then without copying anything new if you to FCP you'll paste what you copied from within FCP.

Maybe this is some feature that's been around that I'm unaware of but it's really handy.

Disk is in Use and You Can't Eject It

Ever had a hard drive you can't eject because the Finder claims it's in use even though no project is open on it, no file is open, no anything is anything on the drive?

Usually the culprit is FCP which sometimes doesn't want to be left all alone and desperately clings to any last vestiges of its former usefulness. There's a Terminal command to find out what is using the drive (or at least what file is open on it) but it's the Terminal and that's not very Mac-Like.

So, recently a free application called WhatsOpen appeared and it's perfect for finding out what's going on. Give it a try and donate something if you like it and find it useful.

This is different from when the Finder just decides to leave a properly ejected drive's icon in the sidebar which does happen on occasion. Those you can just drag out of the sidebar and enjoy the poof of smoke.

If you really want to know the Terminal command it's:

lsof | grep /Volumes/Stubborn-Hard-Drive

Where Volumes/Stubborn-Hard-Drive is the path to the hard drive in question. To make it a little easier just type:

lsof | grep

into the Terminal, then drag in the stubborn hard drive from the Finder and hit return. You'll see what file is "in use" on the drive. lsof, btw means LiSt Open Files.

Scrubbing in the Finder's Preview Column

If you're like a lot of people out there, you dislike the new Preview window in Column View. Why? Two main reasons: one you can't control the volume readily and two, there's no way to scrub through media there.

Scrubbing IS possible if you have an Apple Mighty Mouse. Just hover over the disclosed media in the Preview window and Scroll UP to go Forward and Scroll DOWN to scrub backwards. I have no idea how to do this using just the keyboard unfortunately.

One thing that bugs me about the new Preview window in Leopard is that you must click on the play button to start a preview's playback but you can click anywhere on the preview to stop it. That's inconsistent Finder behavior. And while I'm at it, why doesn't Quickview have a volume slider?

Can't Eject A Volume Because it's in Use? Use lsof.

macosxhints has a really handy bit of terminal magic to find out just what's in use when you can't eject a volume.

QuickLook's Rounding Math

QuickLook in Leopard, which you use by tapping the spacebar when a file in the Finder is highlighted, tends to round some numbers. As you can see in the screenshot of a flash drive a client handed me to use it's actual Get Info stats are:

Capacity = 3.72 GB
Available = 2.97 GB

QuickLook says it's:

Capacity = 3.7 (GB)
Available = 3.0 (GB)

Not much of a difference, I guess but still bothers me.

Command + Tab App Switcher

Here's a simple one that's VERY handy.

You can use Command + Tab to bring up the Application Switcher and keep tapping tab to cycle to the right (including wrap-around). But here's the one that some people don't know about: once you have the app switcher up you can tap ~ (tilde) to cycle to the left with wrap-around.

Handy if you're doing more than quickly using Command + Tab to switch between two apps; if you're using three or more this is a very fast way to toggle between apps and easier on the fingers since some people use Command + Shift + Tab to cycle to the left.

No Name

I've noticed on a few edit stations I've been working at with FCP 6.0.2 and Leopard 10.5.2 that when you mount P2 Media from an HVX-200 they won't show up in the Finder's windows sidebar but they will show up at root level in a Finder window. I'll have to do a bit of testing but it may have something to do with the users selecting not to show mounted volumes on the desktop.

The P2 media work as expected mounting and ejecting reliably but they just do not show up in the sidebar on some machines.

Finder Not Loading with EXT HD Attached

Thought this would be relevant since many people edit with external drives:

Finder may not load with external drive connected in Mac OS X 10.5.2

Issue or symptom
The Finder may not load in Mac OS X 10.5.2 after connecting a third-party external storage drive. The menu bar may appear to "flicker," or desktop icons may repeatedly disappear and reappear.

Renaming Clips

FCP 6 has a feature you may find handy from time to time.

From within FCP if you 2nd click on an item in the Browser you'll see in the contextual menu that pops up the option to Rename the clip. You'll see two options:

Clip to Match File - which renames the clip based on what the media is named in the Finder.
File to Match Clip - which renames the media in the Finder based on what you've named it in the Browser.

Why would you want to rename a clip this way? I can think of a couple of reasons:

1. You've been handed a project that's needs work and isn't very organized. Maybe there are a dozen "untitled" clips or pictures that are named like "DCN_0934.JPG" and you want to get things organized. For a project I had about 12 out of 100+ images needed work that could be done in a batch to I renamed them with my "needs work" appendix and in the finder I could grab all of them en masse and batch repair them since they were spread out among hundreds of other images.

2. You've organized your footage and media in the Browser to your liking and since you may hand the project off to someone else you think they could take advantage of having things named in a sensible manner.

3. You're archiving your project and want it to be organized in case you need to come back to it later or know you will for possible updates and need to know what file is what.

Reveal In Finder Custom Key Command

I've been noticing that lately I've been using Reveal In Finder a lot and it didn't have a key command. Searching through the key commands (Option + J to bring up the Button List) I found out that Control + Option + F wasn't being used so I assigned that to Reveal In Finder.

Btw, there's a teeny known bug in the Finder when you do this. Sometimes it will only reveal the enclosing folder for the file you're looking for and you need to invoke the command twice for it to actually highlight the file you want to find.

Media Manager File Naming Issue

I'm not sure what's causing this issue I've seen on a few stations but when you highlight all the media in the Browser and then select Media Manager (I've set my key command for this to be Option + Command + M) and go through all of the steps (Copying media over, btw) sometimes I'll see an error message like this:

Media Manager File Copy Failed

The attempt to Copy "file" to "/Volumes/Name/Folder/Folder/Media/Folder" failed with an error code of 1"

Or it'll read something like it failed "due to lack of disk space."

What I've noticed is that the file is fine, and there's plenty of room to copy it over. But, for some reason either the Media Manager or, more likely, the Finder decided to rename the file.

Usually it occurs with .wav files. For example, if a file is named "soundfx.wav" when the Media Manager tries to copy it the file will appear as "soundfx.wav.mov" and Media Manager or the Finder gets all confused.

So far I don't have a solution to the problem and if you copy the file over and remove the ".mov" from it and reconnect it the project will be fine. I just need to track down where along the process the file's .mov extension appears.

Concerning file sizes and the inability of Media Manager to copy them and spitting out the lack of dick space error, I've noticed that it will copy a 1.55 Gig file but won't copy a 3.1 Gig file. So perhaps somewhere in between those two sizes is the maximum size of a file that it can copy over because of this bug. If it is a bug.

Color Labels

I like using color labels in Mac OS X and FCP. For me it's just faster seeing PURPLE and then knowing why and what it is. I usually mentally and where I can set my labels to something like this:

Green = Done
Amber = Needs Work
Red = Problems
Gray = Ignore but keep

That's mainly for labels in the Finder. Either way, if you're not color labeling your stuff you should give it a try. It helps me stay organized.