Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Got a linky?

We just bought a couple of BenQ 4K designer ones, whatever the model number is. They are about £450, 27inch and are pretty good.

Not sure I need a £450 monitor. Hmmm. the kind of work I do doesn't really need ultra-accurate colour reproduction.

Around the £400-500 mark is quite reasonable for a good 4K monitor. If you just want a big monitor, normal full HD can be had for a couple of hundreds and they are still quite decent.

What sort of stuff do you do?

I am still relatively happy with my 7 years old Dell. Been itching to get a 4K but it’s absolutely a case of I don’t really need it but I really want it.

Nah no links. It’s the 1200 quid apple lg one. You won’t find better.

What sort of stuff do you do?

Communicate complex shiz through whizzy charts and diagrams. Like an architect, but tech stuff rather than building stuff.

Isn’t it better to get a bigger screen like like 32+ then? Or even one of those super long one?

Looks amazing but too rich for me! I've got by the last six years on a £200 HP thing that maxes out at 1650 * 1050!

My working space has reduced a fair bit since N+1 arrived. 22" fits nicely in the cubby hole where I know do my desk work :)

Bit of a stupid question, I turned on my mac the other day and it was stuck on the loading bar screen, so I restarted it a couple of times and then this was the screen I got telling me something is being updated and installed.

When I finally managed to get back into the system, I checked for updates on the App Store and there is no record of any systemic updates, so what could this be?

I ran a quick malware check and it came back clean. Should I be worried?

I haven’t even used my Mac that much in the last few weeks and when I have used it online, it was the usual websites and nothing looked dodgy or anything...

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Fair does. I actually have a spare apple 24inch monitor too if that’s of interest?

To give my self a sense of progress at something I ordered a 21.5" dell monitor that has a USB-c socket this morning.

Sounds like a good option to be fair... USB C is great...

Sad that they ditched mag-safe though, it was so easy to attach the power lead...

Yeah magnasafe was one of Apple's best inventions, really daft they binned it off. On the flip side having just one cable (TB3) for power, USB hubs (back of monitor) and the monitor itself rather than the old 3 cable solution feels a great improvement.

Has happened in the past when an update has not updated fully.

Might be worthwhile to reset the PRAM and the SMC.

maybe yeah, come to think of it, I might have clicked the wrong button when I last used it with the auto update reminder, that might be it, but bloody gave me a scare as I need my computer more than ever the next couple of weeks to finish off a project...

Finally getting round to sorting a workable storage and back up system.
I’ll probably be backing up manually, quarterly, as apart from downloading films I’m not doing anything that requires constant backing up.
Tell me if I’m missing something in this set up.
Mac Pro main machine, networked to an 8tb NAS.
Mac Pro docs and desktop backed upto external hdd
Films/photos/music on NAS, backed up on external hdd

Where are all those backups being kept?

External hdd’s in a shelving unit close to the Mac Pro for easy access.
NAS is in the front room by the tv

Offsite or don’t bother.

I duplicate everything on-site via time machine

then everything I can't afford to lose goes in to drop box.

Which raid configuration are you using? External HDs in a fireproof safe or offsite. If you’re doing a manual backup you want to be backing up at least weekly. Otherwise you can rsync to an S3/glacier instance.

Is this a QNAP or Synology NAS?

Qnap. Ts-451+

Have not decided on Raid configuration.

Cool. QTS 4.3.4 is very good now.

This is a good explanation of Raid types.
Ideally set this up as Raid 10 but with 2tb drives you'll only get around 3.78TB of usable storage. Make sure you're buying NAS ready drives (you can't just buy regular PC drives) as otherwise they won't play in a Raid configuration at all and will fail fairly quickly. My go to are Western Digital Reds and 4TB or 6TB are best value (I have a TS-869 pro and I'll replace this with a TS-879RU Xeon soon). The WD Reds in there should be good for 5 years in 24/7 use, these have been running for ±2 yrs and have 0 failed blocks. Previous WD reds were fine after 7 yrs, again no failed blocks. In Raid 10 where one drive fails the Raid will remain usable and you won't lose data; you can hot swap the failed drive and the raid will restore data to that disk. Replace failed drives asap as a second failure brings a 50% chance of data loss though.

Plenty of options to back up to cloud or locally. My fave is to rsync to an offsite NAS which can be less powerful and raid 0 configured.

You can run a time machine server on the NAS to backup the iMac and you might like QNAP's download server + VPN. And your TS-451 is fast enough to encode media streams for much fun with Plex.

You'll need to assign a couple of fixed IP addresses to the NAS. How fast is your LAN and wireless router?