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Keeping your iPhoto Library on an external disk while still backing up to Time Machine

Posted by Scarr on August 3rd, 2010 No Comments

I’ve recently run into a bit of a pickle; My iPhoto library has become gigantic because of my photography hobby (I shoot everything in RAW because I like to play around with the resulting image, and I’m freaky about data loss).

So even though I’ve upgraded my Macbook’s hard drive to 500GB internally, I’m still starting to get tight on space.

So I’m fragmenting my iPhoto library to an external disk. The problem with this is now this externally hosted library doesn’t have Time Machine protection.

Here’s what I’m doing;

Move my existing iPhoto Library to an external disk called “Photobox 1″
Open Time Machine preferences, go to Options, under “Exclude these items from backups:”, I highlight “Photobox 1″ and hit the [ - ] box. So this externally mounted drive will now be backed up via Time Machine.
Opening “Photobox 1″, I’ve got “iPhoto Library to August 3 2010″. If I double click on that, iPhoto will open that library.
Holding down the Option key while launching iPhoto will bring up a library picking dialogue. From there you can choose which library to work from.

So now, I’ve got space on my Laptop for current photographs, and I’ve got a separated copy of my old iPhoto archive that is still being backed up to my Time Machine drive.

Of course I don’t just move my old iPhoto library to the Time Machine drive, because if I lose my Time Machine drive in that scenario I’ve lost the iPhoto archive and any possible backups. Ugly! So let’s not do that. Remember folks, always segment your backups from your raw data. Never use your backup as archive; that’s not what it’s for.

A future challenge may be merging a split library, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

"Photobox 1" is a removable SATA drive

Posted in Hardware, Photography, Software, Tech

Mounting a Linux ext2/ext3 filesystem on your MacOS X 10.6 Apple computer

Posted by Scarr on August 3rd, 2010 No Comments

I just wanted to mount a Linux ext3 partition on my MacBook! Doing google searches for this answer yields results, but they are totally buried in back-links and espousals of how cool MacFuse is for mounting every filesystem, including this LifeHacker post with the most misleading title evar (heh). I just wanted the one answer. Anyway here’s the formula, quick and easy.

Download and install the MacFuse package
Download and install the complimentary fuse-ext2
Open up a Terminal, and from the command line (where $ is the beginning of the command line);$ disktool -l ***Disk Appeared ('disk1s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '') ***Disk Appeared ('disk1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '') ***Disk Appeared ('disk0',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '') ***Disk Appeared ('disk0s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '') ***Disk Appeared ('disk0s3',Mountpoint = '/', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'Macintosh HD')
So it looks like our disk partition is disk1s1, since disk0 is our Laptop’s hard drive.. Make a directory where you would like to set the mount point. In my case, I put it into /Users/scarr/tmp/Linux
$ sudo mount_fuse-ext2 -m /dev/disk1s1 /Users/scarr/tmp/Linux/

And kaboom, you should have a disk on your Desktop.

This will only give you read access to your disk, but the good news is you now have access to the files on your Linux ext2/ext3 formatted hard drive! Score..