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Apple, Internet and Network Consulting Services

Do NOT trust Time Machine as your only backup!!!

Modern hard drives keep track of their health, temperature, power-on hours and other important reliability statistics using a technology called Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART). By looking at the SMART data from a drive, you can predict if the drive is going to fail, based on its history.

Apple is neglectful at looking at SMART data and warning the user about a disk in dire health. This Pollyanna approach is dangerous because it gives users a false sense of security about hardware which is likely and prone to fail. In my opinion, this is very irresponsible on Apple’s part (insert finger wag here).

Apple’s Disk Utility program (on every Mac in the Utilities folder) will often report the SMART status of a failing drive as “Verified”. If you look at the actual SMART data, the drive is VERY clearly in the process of failing.  For example, here is Disk Utility’s report on an extremely sick external Time Machine backup drive:

Yet, if you look at the actual SMART data for the drive (I use a program called DriveDX from Binaryfruit.com), the drive has recorded some very serious errors, indicating the drive isn’t healthy and should be replaced:

In addition to the danger of Apple not proactively warning users of a failing disk using SMART data, they also choose not to notify a user when data being written to a Time Machine backup fails. This leads to a false sense of security in regards to the backup of what may be the only copy of a user’s important data.

For this reason, I highly recommend backing up with a program that will notify of any read or write errors on the source or destination drive. I’m a fan of Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software because it will warn the user in the event that it can’t read or write data successfully.

Do NOT rely on a single Time Machine backup of the data on your computer.

Just Say No to Desktop & Documents folders in iCloud Drive!

In a recent set of software updates, Apple has begun asking users if they would like to store the contents of their Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud Drive (Apple’s Dropbox-like repository for files and folders “in the cloud”).

I’m not a fan.

The idea here is to upload everything in these two folders to your iCloud account and keep it all in sync, across multiple computers. While this seems like it might be a good idea, the current implementation has some drawbacks and things to consider before simply checking the box:

  1. If you have lots of files and folders (i.e. Gigabytes) on your Desktop or in your Documents folders, enabling this feature will require you to pay for extra storage space in your iCloud account. Uploading that much data over your internet connection could take days/weeks. This isn’t clear in the initial setup dialog.
  2. Enabling this feature means you have to pay attention to whether a document is stored “locally” or “in the Cloud”. For files/folders which are only stored in iCloud, you must be connected to the internet to work with them.
  3. Disabling the feature isn’t as simple as unchecking the box – there isn’t a simple ‘undo’ command which puts things back they way they were previously. This can be scary because unchecking the box makes everything disappear from your Desktop and Documents folders. The process of disabling the “Documents and Desktop in iCloud Drive” feature requires multiple manual steps to restore the files and folders to their original locations. Here are the instructions:

http://osxdaily.com/2017/07/06/disable-icloud-desktop-documents-mac/

I recommend against enabling this feature in the first place:

Getting Loopy with Sonos

I’ve now untangled several home networks which were brought to a grinding halt due to network “broadcast storms” caused by Sonos music players. This is avoidable and stupid network engineering on Sonos’s part. Here’s more about why this happens:

With networks, it has always been best practice to connect devices via Ethernet cable, whenever possible. Ethernet cabling is faster and more reliable because it is impervious to radio/WiFi interference. Ethernet performance does not degrade over distance like WiFi.

Devices which are capable of being connected via Ethernet should be designed to disable WiFi (preferably automatically) when connected with a cable. This avoids loops in the network, which create “broadcast storms” and bring the network down. The video below explains this phenomenon and also introduces a technology known as “Spanning Tree Protocol” – something we find in more expensive, business-class Ethernet switches, not the usual “unmanaged” Ethernet gear most users have in their homes:

The problem here is two-fold:

  1. Sonos’s engineering team has made the decision to keep the “SonosNet” wireless network active, even when their device is connected via Ethernet. This is almost certainly going to cause broadcast storms on the user’s network.
  2. This requires the user/installer for a HOME network product to be network savvy and have the knowledge and forethought to avoid this serious problem.

If you have Sonos gear on your network and it is connected via Ethernet (as it should be, when possible), you might consider disabling WiFi on your Sonos products as described in the article here:

https://bsteiner.info/articles/disabling-sonos-wifi

Sonos seems to think keeping WiFi enabled on Ethernet connected devices provides some type of redundancy (I guess in case the Ethernet cable gets unplugged?), but I think it is ridiculous and irresponsible to propose the “fix” to be an expensive business-class Ethernet switch in a home environment. Google search for “Sonos Network Storm” and you’ll see how many users this dumb design has impacted. Here, I’ll do it for you:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=sonos+network+storm