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In Reply to: RE: Mac sounds impressive to me posted by bullethead on September 03, 2016 at 04:51:46
Yes, Mac sounds excellent out of the box and even better with some simple tweaks along the way. AV+ includes some useful features like memory play, hog mode, and disabling of a number of unneeded services to mention a few.There's an Apple event on Sept 7th and they are expected to announce the new iPhone and new watch. Apple will often include minor updates to other products during these events, or just some price adjustments. If they don't announce updates to their other products in Sept, many folks are expecting them to before the end of the year.
I believe the latest Mac OS is 10.11.6. Here's a screen shot of "About This Mac" which you access from the Apple icon in the upper left of your screen. This is from my wife's Mac which is much newer than mine. If you update your OS, best to have a hardwired Ethernet connection or a robust and reliable Wifi signal. I prefer hardwired Ethernet.
About This Mac
If you click on the System Report button within the About This Mac screen you will gain access to a bunch of detailed information on your Mac. In the screen shot below (as just one example) you'll see the USB device tree on my Mac Mini. This was when I owned the Oppo HA-1 DAC/headphone amp which you can see is on it's own USB 2.0 bus, not shared by other devices. The Inateck device is my external SSD on the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed bus.
System Report
Backups, etc.
There are several ways to recover from an internal disk glitch including Apple's method which I believe is to restore your OS using the hidden OS partition that resides on your internal disk. The other option is to reload the OS via your network connection which will pull the latest Mac OS over the internet from Apple. These just reload the OS. Then migrate everything else over from your TimeMachine backups. TimeMachine backups to an external disk can also be very helpful in recovering files going back several versions at different points in time. But it is not my main choice for backups since I create fully bootable backups.To make a fully bootable backup of your internal disk (with all of your applications and user created files on it) you'll need to partition and format the external USB disk as "OS X Extended (Journaled)" using Disk Utility. You can launch Disk Utility by going into the Spotlight search icon (upper right on your Mac screen) and typing it in. It will find it and you can launch it from there (or from within your Applications > Utilities folder).
To create bootable backups I would recommend Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. One advantage of CCC is that it will also recreate the hidden restore partition from your internal disk to your external disk. I know that older versions of SuperDuper will not but I haven't tried it lately since I have switched to CCC. You can backup to a USB 3.0 connected SSD or HDD and if your internal SSD fails, or the OS or your music library gets gets botched up, you can boot directly off the external backup and be up and running again immediately. That same backup can be used to restore to your internal disk. To ensure that your backup works, you can try booting to it. With your Mac turned OFF and the USB backup attached. Hold the Option key down then press the Power ON button, continue holding the Option key down until a screen appears giving you choices of devices to bootup from. Choose your external backup device and see if it will boot.
Fun stuff, and worthwhile learning. A bootable backup saved my bacon a few years ago on my old 2007 MBP when I was working on a project. I had a couple days worth of material I was working on over the weekend for stuff I had to present the following week. My internal HDD died. Fortunately I made a recent bootable backup to a partition on my external disk along with several automatic hourly TimeMachine backups to another partition on the external disk. I was able to bootup from the external disk and continue working without any hassles. I was also able to retrieve the latest version of my work from the TimeMachine backup. I ordered a new internal HDD from Amazon and fixed the problem much later..... but in the mean time I was able to keep working from the external backup.
The scenario above can be applied to your dedicated Mac music server. Make a bootable backup and if the internal disk fails, just bootup from the external disk and keep on playing music until you get the problem fixed.
BTW, just for grins have you tried the Terminal and some common UNIX/Linux commands? Try top, netstat, ifconfig, etc. Online manual pages are also there. Try man diskutil. All the stuff you can do in the graphical Disk Utility (and more) are available to you from the command line with diskutil. I have the Terminal application on my dock for quick access and I have also customized the Terminal with black background and green text, which is my comfort zone since working on CRT dumb terminals from decades ago. ;-)
Top, on my work MacBook Pro
Edits: 09/03/16Follow Ups:
thanks a lot Abe, very helpful.
I found a tool called DiskmakerX which I can use to make the Apple OSX bootable image into a USB Disk. I only really have to applications one for recording and one for listening (Reaper multitrack, and Audirvana). I love to wipe out my machines anytime there's a problem and start from scratch.
I found Apple OSX on the apple store and was surprised it was no cost :) I remember paying $100 or so back in the day I think it was many many years ago and it was on DVD.
This is great advice, thanks a lot as well for letting me know about the terminal, glad it is still there. I remember using Fink on Tiger for the IBM Chip at the time, it is great to see it still going, check out Fink, you have so much power if you want :)
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