It’s bad enough when your computer dies and needs to be replaced without having the daunting task of getting your new working environment to be identical to the one you’re familiar with — not to mention getting all of your data moved over, as well.

That’s what I faced when my MacBook Pro display was impossible to use, deemed un-fixable by Apple and my Apple approved service centre earlier this week and the decision was made to ship me a replacement unit (thank you AppleCare!).  The fact that the new system was to be the latest and greatest technology was only moderate consolation to the work that lay ahead.

That’s when the service tech told me that if I use the Leopard OS backup utility called Time Machine, I would be prompted during the installation process if I would like to migrate data from a Time Machine backup.  I’ve been a religious Time Machine user since I upgraded to Leopard in January so I felt the fear of the migration lift a little.

My replacement system arrived today.  I powered it on shortly after 4:00pm and followed the setup prompts.  Sure enough, within a couple of minutes I was asked if I wanted to migrate data from my Time Machine backup (if I had one).  I plugged my Time Machine drive into the computer and selected all of the available options (user data, applications, settings and some Mac files).  It calculated a 3 hour copy time for roughly 170Gb of data.  Perfect!

I picked up my daughters from camp, took one to her music lesson, hung out with the other, took them to the grocery store, went home, had a family dinner, hung out for a bit and then checked on my system.  All of the data and apps had been copied.

I checked for system updates and found there were a few to be applied including the Leopard 10.5.4 upgrade (I guess system updates don’t migrate).   While those updates were downloading I went through all of my applications and discovered that I had been negligent updating some so I downloaded and applied those updates.  Unfortunately, some of my apps also needed to have their license strings re-applied, perhaps because of the new hardware.  That’s a pain because I can’t find the serial number for one of them.

It’s now 9:40pm.  It took about 5 hours to get my new system running with my working environment exactly as I like it — complete with all of my applications and data (all 170Gb worth).  Most of that work was done for me and I didn’t have to be here for it.  I can’t imagine how long it would have taken me if I needed to manually reinstall everything and copy the data I required from the old system.

If you’re not already using Time Machine, what are you waiting for?

I upgraded the Cubase 4 installation on my MacBook Pro from 4.0.3 to 4.1, yesterday evening, and discovered that I was no longer able to import and export MP3 files. The symptoms included:

• Error: Medium type not supported or invalid medium! when trying to import MP3 files;
• Missing export preferences for MPEG 1 Layer 3 File format in the Export Audio Mixdown window; and,
• Unexpected Error when trying to export MP3 files.

I checked the Cubase.net forums and saw that many other people had the same problem. Still, many had a seemless and error-free upgrade. A few workarounds and possible solutions have been shared in the forums with mixed results.

I submitted a ticket to Cubase support today and Lindsay was amazingly helpful and responsive with this Mac-specific fix that worked right away!

• Close all Steinberg applications
• Go to Mac HD–>users–>you–>library–>preferences–>
• Move all Cubase 4 and Cubase SX folders to the system Desktop
• Reopen Cubase 4
• It may take a while for Cubase to rebuild the preferences folder

While it may have been inconvenient and scary for a few hours, Cubase is worth these exciting moments. Of course, if I had lost data it might be a whole different story.

Thanks a million Lindsay and Steinberg!

I brought my MacBook Pro to an authorized Mac service depot to upgrade my internal drive from an 80Gb/5400rpm drive to a 200Gb/7200rpm drive. The service I arranged included a cloning of the data of my existing drive to the new drive so that, other than the sudden increase in available disk space and speed, I would notice no difference.

That was the theory.

As I understand it, the technician used Migration Assistant, a data transfer tool that comes with the Tiger operating system. The process resulted in a new user path on my drive which broke all of the application and data hooks. My environment was a disaster. With the exception of Address Book, all of my applications crashed and reported errors when I started them. I was unable to save data to certain directories in my user environment because I apparently had insufficient privileges. I tried everything I could to fix the environment, drawing on my Unix experience. Nothing worked. Thankfully I still had the original drive in an external chassis and figured out that I could boot to that as an alternative.

By the time 11pm rolled around, I was at my wit’s end. That’s when I took one last look online and discovered Carbon Copy, a shareware tool by Bombich Software that claims to offer the “absolutely best fidelity in the industry“. I rebooted to my original drive, downloaded and installed Carbon Copy and started a drive-to-drive clone of my data. At 1:00am, about 25% into the transfer process, I decided to go to bed.

About twenty minutes ago I bolted out of bed and ran to my computer. Carbon Copy reported that it had done its job and I rebooted to my new internal drive. Sweet success! My system is just as it was before the upgrade, only with a larger and faster drive. All of my applications load, all of my data is accessible and I have privileges to my user environment.

Thank you Carbon Copy!!! A donation has been made.

About a month ago, Anders Holte Nielsen announced that he has discontinued development of his popular Counterize WordPress plugin, a plugin that summarizes and presents statistical information about a WordPress blog. Fortunately, he offered a solid alternative, the relatively young FireStats plugin by Omry Yadan.

I installed FireStats on two of my WordPress sites today. The installation was typically easy and the interface is slick with a collection of important statistical information. Even so, one of my FireStats installations came up with nice tabbed navigation interface, the other did not. I posted a comment on the FireStats Blog to report the problem. Omry was right on top of the post - he replied within fifteen minutes. The issue appears to be with the way the Sociable plugin applies javascript to the WordPress administrative interface, and Omry is tracking the problem as issue 51 in his ticket system.

If Omry can add a graphs tab that provides graphical representations of hits and visits by hour, day of week, day of month and month of year (current, average and running totals for these graphs would also be great) I would have no reason to operate any other statistical plugins. For icing on the cake, I would love it if FireStats had full featured statistical gathering for the PodPress plugin since PodPress has some unresolved bugs and development efforts seem to be stagnating.