I can tell Apple is taking the new opportunity of selling iPhones in China really seriously. This update just turned up on my iPhone, and I don’t even live in China. Presumably every iPhone5 user in the world has to install an update just so they can fix a provisioning problem with iPhones sold in China. ‘Provisioning’ is all about activating a new phone on to a phone network, so it looks like they’ve had some issues with Chinese customers unable to use their shiny new smartphones.
Yesterday Time Machine on my MacBook started to fail with the message:
“The problem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. If the problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk”
It kept erroring after each hourly backup attempt. So I tried the obvious and unmounted the external HDD, turned off/on, remounted, ran backup again, no dice.
I ran Disk Utility to repair the disk, no dice.
I then found this forum post , which led me to the absolutely fantastic Pondini site (the link on the forum post is old, you need to go here) and smacked my head because I’m an idiot, I already have the Time Machine Buddy widget on my Desktop, just been so long I had forgotten.
That showed me:
“Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/2TB/Backups.backupdb
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
2.52 GB required (including padding), 1.18 TB available
Indexing a file failed. Returned 1 for: /Library/Spotlight, /Volumes/2TB/Backups.backupdb/Apple’s MacBook Pro (2)/2013-09-03-071009.inProgress/C981E713-FC42-4A7D-BDD5-C83709DF0D5B/Macintosh HD/Library/Spotlight
Aborting backup”
Which shows that Time Machine has been choking on a Spotlight search file, which in turn led me to notice that my Spotlight seemed to be taking forever to complete an index (you can tell Spotlight is indexing, there’ll be a tiny black dot in the circle of the Spotlight magnifying glass top right of your screen).
In fact, the hours remaining at one point said “About 11 MONTHS” remaining. Not encouraging. I know there’s a way to force Spotlight to reindex your Mac:
This should kick off a fresh index, it’s much easier than one method I figured out a while ago where you manually delete the Spotlight index file (at one stage my Spotlight decided it didn’t want to index my local hard drive, just my external drives).
So far so good. Time Machine successfully completed its last backup. Spotlight has been sporadically re-indexing, but appears to be returning correct search results when I try a few tests.
I’ve long pondered this – if I have my MacBook connected both to ethernet and WiFi, which internet connection is it actually using?
In general sitting at my desk I want my Mac on ethernet, because speed-wise I see anything up to 100Mb down our cable connection. But I like having the WiFi on because then my iPhone and iPad are syncing in the background, and I don’t have to remember to turn the WiFi on and off as I move to and fro. However, the connection speed over the WiFi is slower, and I tend to see disconnects from my company’s VPNs although I could probably solve that with a bit of fiddling with the cable router configuration.
Finally I’ve tracked down the answer, and it’s simple.
Open System Preferences > Network. You’ll see a list of your connections on the left hand side. The active ones are green.
The answer is, your Mac will use the connections in order – so if Ethernet is active and top of the list, that’s the connection used.
By default the order looks good to me – but you can change. Click the little ‘gear’ icon at the bottom of the list, there’s an option to change the order.
David Eedle 