Bombich Software:
For Sonoma and Sequoia users, CCC now offers an option to set a custom icon on locally-attached source and destination volumes. Select an image of your own, or get creative with Apple’s new Image Playground.
I’ve been doing this manually (dragging into Finder’s Get Info window), and I find that it really helps to have different icon colors and badges to quickly tell which drive is which.
This version of CCC embraces new macOS functionality that allows us to avoid installing the CCC helper tool into Macintosh HD > Library > PrivilegedHelperTools. The helper tool will be "registered" with macOS, but will remain inside of the CCC application bundle. This new practice resolves a long list of complications that have arisen over the years with the legacy LaunchDaemon configuration as Apple has improved macOS platform security.
I’m guessing this uses SMAppService.
The Snapshot Comparison Browser search field now supports wildcard and regular expression searches.
The biggest backup problem I’ve been seeing lately—and I don’t think it’s really CCC’s fault—is that it’s sometimes unable to automatically prune old APFS snapshots, so the destination volume ends up full, and the backup fails. CCC usually does a better job than Disk Utility at showing the snapshots, though in some cases neither is able to delete them. Disk Utility recommends restarting the Mac, which is a really pain but does sometimes help. It’s unclear to me what causes the problem and why ejecting and remounting the drive isn’t enough. I wonder if there’s some sort of APFS issue because oftentimes the oldest bunch of snapshots show zero for the size, and deleting them doesn’t seem to free up any space. Is this because CCC had started deleting them but was only partially successful? (I would have thought this would be atomic.) Or because they lost data?
And sometimes the snapshots seem to be totally undetectable or even unviewable, with Disk Utility on Sequoia reporting permissions errors if I try to repair the drive. I tried another Sequoia Mac with no luck. A Mac with an older version of macOS made more progress with two of the drives damaged in this way, successfully scanning the snapshots that Sequoia had not been able to see, but ultimately it found errors that it couldn’t fix. With the old snapshots inaccessible, anyway, I ended up reformatting the drives. I never had these types of problems before, so I wonder whether Sequoia somehow damaged these drives or whether it’s just bad luck.
Spotlight will now be disabled on the destination by default when selecting the option to use a destination volume exclusively for the CCC task in the Backup Volume Setup Assistant. Users can also select a volume in the sidebar and disable (or re-enable) Spotlight via a switch. This change will hopefully address the interference that Spotlight and its mediaanalysisd buddy are causing with regard to unmounting CCC destination volumes.
Yay! I find Spotlight useless with backup drives. It seems to slow things down at best or sometimes cause worse problems like not being able to eject the drive, which also seems to be a new issue with Sequoia.
Previously:
Apple File System (APFS) Backup Carbon Copy Cloner Icons launchd Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Spotlight Storage
Peter Mommsen:
Around the globe, governments are increasingly committed to making the right to repair the law of the land. India’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs is developing a set of rules requiring manufacturers of electronics, farm equipment, and automobiles to let people fix products themselves. France requires tech manufacturers to register their products with a national “repairability index.” And in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will crack down on repair restrictions.
Whatever the merits of these specific policy measures, they are responding to a growing sense that a consumer economy based on pushing people to discard the old and buy the new is no longer sustainable. Yet in an age in which smartphone models go out of date within months and many clothes are worn once or twice before being binned, the champions of repair face powerful obstacles. After all, obsolescence of consumer goods has been a cornerstone of the growth of developed economies for a century.
Hanan Zaffar and Danish Pandit (Hacker News):
Across India, in metro markets from Delhi’s Nehru Place to Mumbai’s Lamington Road, technicians like Prasad are repurposing broken and outdated laptops that many see as junk. These “Frankenstein” machines — hybrids of salvaged parts from multiple brands — are sold to students, gig workers, and small businesses, offering a lifeline to those priced out of India’s growing digital economy.
“We take usable components from different older or discarded systems to create a new functioning unit. For instance, we salvage parts from old laptop motherboards, such as capacitors, mouse pads, transistors, diodes, and certain ICs and use them in the newly refurbished ones,” says Prasad.
[…]
“A college student or a freelancer can get a good machine for INR 10,000 [about $110 USD] instead of spending INR 70,000 [about $800 USD] on a brand-new one. For many, that difference means being able to work or study at all.”
[…]
The Indian government has started discussions on right-to-repair laws, inspired by similar efforts in the European Union and the United States. However, progress remains slow, and repair shops continue to operate in legal limbo, often forced to source different parts from informal and e-waste markets.
Environment Hardware India Legal Unauthorized Repair
Jason Koebler:
Right to repair legislation has now been introduced in all 50 states, a milestone that, despite not all passing, shows the power of the grassroots political movement. Thursday, Wisconsin became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair bill.
So far, right to repair laws have been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon. Another 20 states are formally considering right to repair bills during this current legislative session. The rest have previously introduced bills that have not passed; so far we have seen that many states take several years to move a given right to repair bill through the legislative process.
Karl Bode:
And in some instances the bills have been watered down post-passage, like in New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul buckled to company lobbying to make the law much weaker while also exempting many of the most problematic industries.
Elsewhere, state governments just aren’t really enforcing the laws so far despite no shortage of corporate violators. Reformers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve yet to see a meaningful enforcement action against a major company in any of the states that have passed such legislation.
Previously:
Hardware iOS Legal Mac Unauthorized Repair
