Tag Archives: backup

Speed Up Time Machine

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If you’re using an Apple Mac computer, you may have observed that the fantastic backup system Time Machine, may run slowly. This is especially noticeable when you are doing the very first backup (when it has to backup the entire system).

I was frustrated by this a while ago when I purchased a new hard drive to do my backup’s on.

After a bit of digging, I found that time machine’s performance is throttled so as not to impact system performance.

There is a way to remove performance throttling using a system control statement.

debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled

If you use the sysctl command to set this to 0 (zero) then time machine will not be throttled. If it’s set to 1 (one), it will be throttled.

I created a little script called ‘speedup-timemachine’ that lets me turn the option on and off.

‘speedup-timemachine on’ will remove the throttling.

‘speedup-timemachine off’ will return the throttling.

Below is the script. Just copy the script, paste it into a text editor, save the script to a location on the path, and make it executable (chmod a+x scriptfile).

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Automatic Snapshots on Lightsail

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The folks at Amazon Lightsail have added a new, much needed, feature: Automatic snapshots.

Shapshots are a way of creating an exact backup of your Lightsail instance. You can use this snapshot to move the instance to another region, move it to the more flexible EC2 platform, or just create a new instance based on an existing one.

Previously, the only way to automate snapshots was to create AWS Lambda functions with Cloudwatch triggers. I was able to get that setup, but it took quite a while.

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Creating Bootable Ghost Recovery USB Flash Drive

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Those of you who follow my blog (or know me in person) are well aware that I’m a big fan of Norton Ghost backup software.

One of the major problems I’ve had with Norton Ghost is the fact that it only provides the ability to create a recovery CD … it doesn’t provide any ability to install the recovery software on a USB flash drive.   USB flash drives are much faster that CD’s and are read/write, so they can be updated at a later date.

After a bit of digging, I’ve figured out how to create one without too much trouble.

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