I HATE APPLE

I'm holding off on upgrading MacOS until there's a vaccine

ok so i think i installed my new battery successfully on my own (currently mid-calibration but it is def charging, which the old one wasn't)

holy shit mark! don’t want to jinx it but hats off!

congratulations mark s

has anyone here ever replaced the screen glass on a unibody MacBook Pro? was it terribly difficult?

my mid-2010 model, which I had assumed to be dead for other reasons, seems to be working well except for cracked glass (the display looks fine otherwise)

ifixit describes a really involved process requiring opening the case, but I've seen a guy on YouTube do it by "simply" removing the old glass and installing a new piece

laptop battery now fully charged and re-calibrated so that's a thumbs up

as caek suggested, replacing it wasn't difficult, just a bit fiddly (some of the screws are v tiny and you don't want to drop them into the machinery or down the cracks in the floorboards)

ps i did get a spudger with my specialist screwdrivers but it was not in the end needed

replacement battery operative and robust, i guess i have to put in the work to free up some memory

i: do backblaze fans know any ways to dial down its space hogging
ii: ilxor tips on what i can clear out of ancient garbage which cleanmymac™ fails to dig out

Just archive everything. Throw it in Dropbox and use selective sync.

I've never noticed Backblaze hogging space! Hmm

when i was bothered by the spinny disc like 18 months ago i took it to the tiresome man in hackney road and that was his diagnosis: remove cleanmymac and quit backblaze

i did for a while and things were better but then i decided i wanted both of them for the things they do? also i want a less tiresome man to advise me on my laptop and mend it when necessary

also apps keep quitting unexpectedly that are usually robust: chrome, msil, scrivener

{i never use anything else lol)

mail not msil

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/report-apple-will-begin-selling-macs-with-its-own-processors-in-2021/

God help us if they're abandoning x86.

did we have this discussion already? once backblaze does it's initial back-up, it's pretty harmless. I've never noticed it doing much at all.

I wouldn't bother with cleanmymac though. I'd run Onyx every now and again, and use appzapper or appcleaner to clear out old applications and their files.

I use daisydisk (mostly because my old license is still good) and use it to dig into where the clutter is hiding but otherwise don’t have anything lording over my files

ppl on reddit having the same problem (some with replies saying "i'm baffled this shd not be happening")
https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/9rgacc/backblaze_bztransmit_process_is_chewing_up_almost/
https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/aoeb4s/ballooning_wired_memory_usage_from/

we did discuss it before (when i was wondering abt reinstalling it): ppl (= tracer and dan s i think) said it shd not be a problem bcz it's not a memory hog. so i re-installed and it stated to be a problem again. one solution i guess implied by the reddit threads is "simply have less files" which is a thing i plan to make happen. maybe that will solve it. or maybe something else is going on (this is literally all magic to me, if i installed a grasp of how it all works in my brain i wd be getting spinny disk problems in my head)

Having 10% of your disk space free is critical - have you checked that lately?

yes and i do

Grrrr

i plan to empty it further when i can gather the will but

I like Grand Perspective for a visualisation of what is taking up disk space.

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

have I recommended the ol hurl into the sea recently?

under lockdown i cannot access the sea

Out the window then

lol so i took ed's suggestion and DLed GrandPerspective:

https://i.imgur.com/VzlQdKW.png

the big red square in the bottom right is backblaze

ii: ilxor tips on what i can clear out of ancient garbage which cleanmymac™ fails to dig out
― mark s, Saturday, April 25, 2020 9:52 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Have you ever used OnyX? It probably won't help much with visualizing your HD space to delete junk from your HD, but I think it does a good job of cleaning out the cobwebs (and, once you've run through a few of their recommended sweeps, ends up deleting 5-10gb of HD junk that you probably would never have felt comfortable deleting. I'm using a Late 2008 Macbook running El Capitan, and I feel like OnyX has helped keep everything running smoothly (probably run it whenever things start getting unstable, prob about once a year, and it usually helps).

will try thk u

Has backblaze finished its backup?

i thought i could catch it on a brief pause in its endless backing up and tried to answer yr question but of course it started backing up again, it's p much always backing up

the schedule ive given it is "start at 22.oo end at 8.oo" (ie overnight when i am sleeping and/or worrying) but it does not seem to respect this schedule

How much work are you doing? It should take a week or two to back everything up. After that it’s just incremental. Are you not letting it finish the initial backup?

the initial back-up took place a long long time ago (some years ago) and yes i think to 6-8 days i forget now, the "just incremental" element is constant if not quite non-stop

don't really know how to answer "how much work are you doing" -- i'm a writer and an editor so i'm working all day daily on documents in word and/or scrivener but i can't imagine this is creating enough vast new material in itself to justify the amount of incremental backup apparently required, even if a doc is like 200,000 words or whatever

i mean i am quite likely doing something wrong and dumb! but it is not evident to me what it is (beyond having way too much stuff on my laptop but that's kind of a different issue, the vast bulk of it is entirely unchanging)

if backup software is constantly chugging memory all the time, isn't that... wrong?

this is my feeling yes

Mark, the chugging may have its own bad causes but it does suggest that you've got a spinning HD rather than an SSD. If you wanted to switch to the latter for a big leap in performance I can recommend a friend who is a whizz at Macs and works locally - he could do the job for you as he did for me and gave my MacBook a huge new lease of life a few years ago. I do keep AV stuff on an extetnal HD though as those files take up too much room for an affordable SSD.

He's Pablo at http://applecoreservices.com

yeah. I have a 9-year-old computer on BB and I've never noticed it actually doing its thing. Every now and again I check the logs and it is actually backing up overnight. I think I have mine set to 2am-6am but it generally only spends about 15 minutes backing up.

I would say reinstall and start the whole backup from scratch. If that's possible. Something must be corrupted somewhere - not what you want in a backup!

Upgrading to an SSD would be a great move regardless!

All this agita about online backups has me thinking maybe it would be easier to just plug in a drive

doesn't help with robbery, a flood, etc (though mark does live in the top floor so flooding probably not high on the risk register)

biggest win potentially here is mark dispensing with reliance on the jackass of hackney road

yes

I’m dealing with gigabytes if data. Huge audio files, image files etc. I have a 2017 iMac with a 4 drive enclosure, all backed up via backblaze and I notice no problems at all. I also have a cheap huge WD drive on my desktop for time machine.

If you’re not working off an SSD that’s your first problem. Then if you system drive doesn’t have TONS of free space that’s the second. Get stuff off that drive. External hard drives are cheap. Thumb drives are cheap.

If those two things don’t fix your problems something’s buggy and you should be nagging backblaze support.

ok

Just as a point of reference, my equivalent block of Backblaze was only 631MB, NB I have very fast internet upstream so my initially backup only took a few hours and I almost never see Backblaze at work.

I put a ssd in an imac a few years ago and it was great until the last update didn’t play well with the upgrade. It’s glitchy and I have to research how to fix it.

It's so messed up that the only Macs that aren't thermally limited are either (1) $7k+ (2) built-in everything, including the screen.

Thermally limited ?

processor throttling afaict

most aren’t that limited and, I would argue, opting in to limiting for battery life should be an option

Yeah it throttles down CPU speed when it gets too hot. Conventional wisdom has it that this is an issue for Macbook Pros and Mac Minis but maybe the Mini at least has gotten better? Better enough to run Witcher 3 with an eGPU in Bootcamp though? eh? eh?

update on my backblaze issues: since i switched to "backup now" as my option to decide ive had 0 problems with the return of the spinny disc -- will follow up on SSD as advised at some future point (like when i can get a bus to this guy's workplace and not a 4-hr round walk lol)

i also found some more space just via deleting attachments in mail which had built up since i last had a clear-out and will maybe try OnyX at some point also to really get into the dusty nooks and crannies

If you mean my friend Pablo he says he does pickups.