that infamous "preparing..."

[aicul]

So here I am waiting…

A few words of why I am writing this post.

Last night my mac just shut down, its 2003 model and recently its fan has started making a noise. So I was not too surprised.

No problem, I restart the mac and actually observe the fan does not move. So I attach the vacuum cleaner to the heat vents and decide to get the mac to do a last timemachine backup prior to bringing the mac for repeairs.

That was 2 hours ago… 2 hours of “preparing”…

Now lets be clear, the last successful backup was at 21:32 which means the mac shutdown between then and 22:32. The mac was not used in that time – I was eating dinner.

A simple disk copy would have taken less time.

So I am writing this post to highlight some of those absurd “preparing” things mac OSX does without applying common sense:

• Timemachine should have a “just backup now” button that bypasses the “preparing”.
• When compressing large files in a close to full disk, the ZIP says “preparing” and this goes on for several minutes, only to later state there is insufficient disk space. Since the ZIPed file should not exceed the size of its composing files, where is the difficulty of doing an immediate sanity check of disk availability.
• When on the move with a mac portable, the mail application inevitably attempts to “synchronize mailboxes” leading to an endless process. Ok, but my short one-liner email just sits in the outbox waiting even if marked high priority. How about an empty outbox first option.
• When transferring a large files (say 3 files), the finder shows a close to immobile progress bar and 1 of 3… there is absolutely no real cue for progress. Progress should be in volume of data in these cases
• Etc.

Please Apple, please test your apps in true usage mode, somewhere outside of your comfortable offices.

Ps. Timemachine is still… “preparing”