NetMusician Labs

I’m using Time Machine with my Ubuntu machine since it has more disk attached to it. Here is what I had to do to get this working with Time Machine. For this, you’ll need some sort of external hard drive for temporary use for configuration

1) Install Netatalk

2) Setup a share, name it something appropriate for your backup use

3) Connect your external HD, name it identically

4) Start your Time Machine backup. You don’t have to let it the backup complete, we just need two files from this backup. One is a file entitled .<yourMacAddress>, and the other “.com.apple.timemachine.supported”. Copy these files over to your AFP volume

5) Make sure these files appear in your AFP volume:

cd /Volumes/<yourVolume>
ls -al

6) Mount your AFP volume. It should appear listed in /Volumes with the same name as your external drive volume (if your external drive is mounted simultaneously, it may have a “-1″ attached to the end of the file name. If this is the case, unmount both so that all you have in /Volumes is your AFP volume as titled in step 2 and 3

7) Your disk should appear in the Time Machine preferences pain now, and it should show you when the next backup will be. To invoke a backup now, right click on your Time Machine icon in the dock, and click “backup now”

A .sparsebundle disk image will be created on your network volume containing your backup

In addition to disk space, this will help keep the number of files that exist on the hard drive down, for those that wish to use your backup hard drive for other things other than TM backups. Otherwise, Time Machine will simply continue to utilize your entire disk until it has filled up.

Firstly, you will need to disable ACLs on your backup volume, see:

How to delete files in a Time Machine backup through the terminal

To delete backups older than a certain date, execute the following Unix command in your terminal:

sudo find /path/to/backupset -maxdepth 1 -ctime +1 -exec rm -rfv {} \;

Change the path to your backup to:

/Volumes/<yourVolume>/Backups.backupdb/<yourMachinename>

The -ctime +1 means “a creation time of older than 1 day”. You can change the +1 to +2 (or any other number) to look for backups older than 2 days, and you can remove the plus if you would like to look for backups exactly n number of days old.

Doing so seems to be safe - the next time you invoke the Time Machine interface the old backups will simply be gone from the timeline.

As discussed in both the AppleInsider and the Siracusa Ars Technica Time Machine reviews, deleting hard linked files like this is safe - by deleting a hard linked file you are not deleting the original as long as there is another copy of the file somewhere else. IOW, in order to completely delete a file you need to delete all copies of the file, including hard links. If this doesn’t make sense to you, the bottom line is that deleting old backup sets seems to be a safe thing to do

I could not find a good way to disable the ACLs on the backup volume, and since the entire backup set is set to prevent everybody from deleting it (even as root), I suppose to protect the user, it is not possible to manually delete this data. However, if you know what you are doing and want to override this:

sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/<yourVolume> -d

Will disable ACLs on your backup volume. Then you can go in and delete stuff via a simple:

sudo rm -rf

(these files are all owned by root)

You can use the GUI to delete backup sets as well, but I intend to run scheduled scripts to automate deleting old backups in order to keep the number of files and disk usage on the drive down…

This comparison is between Leopard Mail and Thunderbird. I’d throw in Entourage, but I don’t use it myself. I’m rather bias about its stupid need to throw everything into a database, its reported consequent mailbox corruption, its lack of TLS support until 2004, etc. If you want to contrast any of these comparisons against Entourage, I welcome your input!

All in all, while OS X Mail is still missing several advanced email features, there seems to be enough there for me to use on a semi-regular basis, but I will still require some part-time use in Thunderbird. There are several nice new features that may make this inconvenience worthwhile though.

Here is a feature by feature comparison of things that make it or break it for me:

IDLE support

Finally! I didn’t even realize that Tiger Mail was missing this feature, but it makes sense, as Tiger mail was extremely chatty and unusably slow for me due to wanting to constant resynchronize. Why IDLE support was missing from Tiger Mail is beyond me, this is hardly a bleeding edge feature. One question though: why would there even be a checkbox to turn this off? Why on Earth would anybody want to turn off IDLE support?

Mailbox subscription support

Mail still does not allow me to unsubscribe from my personal folders, only public and shared folders. However, while it is a pain to have to waste screen space with my archived folders, and while Mail is chattier at startup having to examine folders I don’t care about, the addition of IDLE support seems to help a great deal - at least it keeps performance in check

Multiple identity support

This is still a deal breaker for me, I will still have to use Thunderbird for sending mail as non-default identities. This is my biggest feature request for Mail, and frankly I don’t know why Apple has left this out all these years. Even lowly Entourage has this feature, AFAIK!

Cyrus Squatter support

Mail does not support Squat (server side indexing of Cyrus Mail accounts), but since Spotlight seems to work so well and is no longer a pain in the ass in terms of performance (coinciding with the chattiness of Tiger Mail), I can live with this.

Ability to define what folders to check for new mail in

Leopard Mail will look for new messages in all mailboxes, which is an improvement - particularly for server side mail filtering. However, if you are subscribed to a busy mailing list and have some sort of notification turned on (e.g. GrowlMail/Mail Appetizer) there is no way to define what folders to check for new mail on on a folder by folder basis…
All in all, I prefer OS X Mail’s attachment handling over Thunderbird, its speed overall (especially after a few minutes of having Mail open having gone through all of my folders), its key bindings, unified mailboxes feature, and the new notes feature looks like it will be a real plus for me as well. Mail Appetizer is nicer than Thunderbird’s Growl plug (although Bundles seem to be really crashy and unstable in Mail right now)