[OS X TeX] Pointer to .bib file

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 2 avr. 06 à 15:11, Winfried Zettelmeyer a écrit :

> I make backups of the entire drive and have not thought of backing  
> up Library separately which would secure, as you say, mail messages  
> AND the bib file in one go. I wonder about your backup policy, what  
> do you do ?

Now that I have a 160GB LaCie external drive at work, I am doing  
backups of my entire home directory. The ~/Documents folder is not  
enough, as there are many things you'll want to keep (e-mailboxes,  
bookmarks, keychains, etc.) that live in ~/Library; plus music in ~/ 
Music, and so forth. Apple offers pre-designed selections of items to  
save, but I find it easier to just save the whole home directory.

My backup strategy: one full backup on the 1st day of the month, plus  
incremental backups each day. My home directory is a bit above 20GB.

All this is possible in my case with Apple's Backup, because I have  
a .Mac subscription. I thought there were no restrictions on Backup's  
use for non-.Mac subscribers, but I read somewhere IIRC that, without  
a .Mac subscription, Backup cannot save more than 20MB (or some other  
limit, I don't remember for sure) in one go.

Another possibility is the utility that comes with the external hard  
drive itself: SilverKeeper. I haven't tried it. This one is LaCie- 
specific, I imagine other hard drive manufacturers provide similar  
software.

Finally there is also Carbon Copy Cloner, which allows cloning an  
entire hard drive, making the clone bootable. I think it does  
incremental backups too, but I haven't tried it. Other people on this  
list mentioned also SuperDuper, I haven't tried it either.

Back to Backup: it can normally use the iDisk that comes with  
the .Mac subscription, but I have entirely given up on my iDisk due  
to the ridiculously slow connection between France (where I reside)  
and the US (where the iDisk reside). Examples of annoyance:

- Don't modify the default setup which is to keep a local copy of the  
iDisk on your hard drive for offline use, and to have it synchronized  
automatically. Unfortunately I did that. Result: given that most of  
the time I leave my office in a rush in the evening, I try to shut  
off my PowerBook and have to wait generally several minutes before it  
completes the shutoff. Extremely annoying (when all you're thinking  
about is the irate partner expecting you at home already)! It took me  
some time before realizing this was caused by the iDisk  
synchronization. And, as for all network-related tasks performed in  
the Finder, in these cases the Finder becomes totally unresponsive,  
all you can do is look at the spinning wheel of death and wait.

- Use a .Mac address in IMAP mode (I'm not even sure POP is an option  
any longer; or has it ever been?). Result: when opening in the  
morning my OS X TeX mailbox containing generally between 10 and 40  
messages, say, Mail takes maybe 2 or 3 minutes to get all the  
messages; then, it takes several seconds to notice I have read a  
message and moved to the next one, and sometimes it even fail to  
notice it and doesn't flag the message as "read" at all.

Do other .Mac users out of the US experience similar problems?

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/