Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Mavericks Mayhem Continues?

I have to say with all the problems I’ve had with Mavericks the last thing I want to ever do is upgrade to a new operating system. But it seems one will be available this fall. I have strong doubts I’ll be upgrading this fall or any fall to come.

Still haven’t got the scanner part of my HP all in one to work. It’s still producing those wonderful Jackson Pollock type prints. I have got Preview to scan things.

The next problem I had was with Time Machine. All of a sudden it stopped working. I got an error message saying there wasn’t enough disk space to do the back up. I thought that really strange because what is supposed to happen is that as the disk Time Machine is backing up to gets full old back ups are deleted. This obviously was not happening.

I did some research on-line to see if I could figure out how to solve the problem myself. What I found is you should be able to go into the Time Machine program and see old backups. There would be a list of the backups on the left hand side of the screen. You should be able to select a backup and then delete it. Thus freeing up space on the disk. The problem was I could only see one backup. There was only one back up listed on the side. I figured I'd probably have to reformat the drive.

But before I did that I decided to make a trip to the Apple Store in Georgetown and see if I could get some help. I took a couple of screen shots of what I was getting.

Sunday after a training session I headed off to the store. On the way into Georgetown I walked passed George Will. This should have been a sign of things to come.

I walked into the Apple Store and there was the usual six people waiting to help. I told my tale. I said this only seemed to have started since I upgraded to the the new operating system. I added I was less than happy with it and went through a quick list of the problems I had with it. I was told the best thing to do would be to bring my computer in for a genius appointment.

I said so I have to schlep in my computer and my hard drive for someone to look at. I said I thought that was a little much. The guy said all they were there for was to sell things. I was less than happy about this and expressed that.

The guy said he'd see what he could do. He took my screen shots and went back and talked to a couple of guys. He came back and said the best thing to do would be to reformat the drive. That there must be some file that couldn't get backed up that was causing the problem. I thanked him and left.

Last thing I wanted to do was reformat the whole damn drive. I went home and contemplated what to do. I contemplated for a whole day. I ran a verification on the drive. It came back saying the drive was fine and had like 100,000 files on it. So the backups were there they just couldn't be accessed.

I thought occurred to me that instead of reformatting the entire drive maybe I could delete the files on it. I opened the main backup folder and selected the folder under that and moved it to the trash. A status bar appeared keeping showing the progress of moving all the files to the trash. It took something like 25 minutes to move all of the files. After that I said delete the files. That took well a couple of hours to do. At one point the status bar said I had -15,000 files to delete. I thought that really really odd but the available disk space on the drive continued to go up.

Once that was done, I started the back up process. Since this was a full back up of all my files it took a long time to do. I'm not sure how long because I just left the computer alone. It did say back up successful. Yeah.

I checked last night and Time Machine was working the way it was supposed to. It was backing up. You could go to the various back ups that had been done (I think there were four). So far so good.

Hopefully this will be the last surprise Mavericks has in store because I'm not in the mood for any more.

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