Category Archives: Tips & Tricks

Make a local snapshot using MobileBackups on Mac OS X Lion

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Mac OS X Lion introduced MobileBackups, a new TimeMachine feature that stores local backups of your files while you are away from your main TimeMachine backup disk. This feature stores filesystem snapshots inside a virtual drive on your local disk, so should not be considered as a main backup strategy. The system automatically does periodic snapshots, but you can also manually initiate the process.

To make a local snapshot of the current state of your files, enter this command in your Terminal window:

sudo tmutil snapshot

It should complete almost instantaneously, giving you a tick in the TimeMachine backups timeline.

 

Disable TimeMachine local backups on Mac OS X Lion

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Mac OS X Lion introduces a new TimeMachine backup feature for the MacBook Air and Pro notebooks, called MobileBackups. It is a local version of TimeMachine backups that enables local snapshots of your data while you’re mobile and away from your main TimeMachine backups. On the TimeMachine timeline screen, local backups are shown as white ticks, while main backups are purple.

This is a neat feature, however it eats up your hard disk space and can grow to tens of gigabytes very fast. Thankfully, you can disable it permanently or temporarily by using the tmutil program.

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Monitoring disk I/O on MacOS X with iosnoop, fs_usage and iotop

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MacOS X comes with great command line programs for debugging and troubleshooting various issues with your system. If you ever need to check what program is accessing your disk, use these three programs: iosnoop, fs_usage and iotop.

All require the sudo password, as they tap deep into your kernel to get the information.

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Capturing the screen in MacOS X

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MacOS X comes with a built-in ability for capturing screenshots. The two most popular ones are:

Command ⌘ + Shift + 3 for capturing the whole screen and Command ⌘ + Shift + 4 for capturing a portion of the screen. The latter one changes your mouse pointer into a cross-hair, allowing you to select an area. Both shortcuts place the result onto a PNG file on your desktop.

How about capturing only the active application window? There is a trick for that too.

Press Command ⌘ + Shift + 4, then press Space, and the mouse pointer will change to a camera icon and highlight the active window under it. Click to make the capture.