By default, most computers come with one partition and one volume on that partition. Well, in OS X there’s also a recovery partition, but that’s hidden so we’ll pretend like there’s just one. You can create additional volumes, which are useful for a number of different scenarios. The operation of creating partitions usually involves resizing a partition. That can be somewhat dangerous, so make sure to backup your Mac before doing so. To create an additional partition (and by default an HFS+ filesystem on that partition), first open Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities. Note that by default, the boot volume is highlighted. You can’t create a partition inside a volume or…
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Enable And Disable Permissions On Volumes Using A Script
Someone hands you a USB drive. You put it in your computer and you can’t access anything on it. You are running an imaging lab and you want to backup or troubleshoot a device before you re-image it, but you can’t access certain files. Obviously, you can sudo. But, you can also simply disable permissions on that volume (which, like getting someone to make you a sandwich, requires sudo of course). The command used to enable and disable permissions on a volume is vsdbutil, located at /usr/sbin/vsdbutil. And there’s a LaunchDaemon at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.vsdbutil.plist that interacts with diskarbitrationd so that when a volume is mounted, it is marked as having permissions…
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How Big Is My Journal And Where Is It?
Back when I worked with Xsan a lot more than I do now, one of the things we spent a lot of time doing was working with metadata and journal data on Xsan volumes. You can also view journal data for non-Xsan volumes. The hfs.util binary is used to view journal data about volumes. In this example, we’ll look at the journal size and location the boot volume of our system: /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/hfs.util -I /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD The output shows the size of the journal and the location, as follows: /Volumes/Macintosh HD : journal size 40960 k at offset 0x1a38b000
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Moving the Journal @afp548
I did a little article for afp548 that was posted while I was out of town. It’s on moving the journal of an HFS+ file system to offload the performance hit. Not terribly complicated but hopefully useful. Anyway, check it out here.
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Mac Backups: HFS+
Tivoli, Backup Exec, NetBackup – they don’t backup resource forks. So if you need your resource forks (and you probably do) then look towards a Mac backup app, like Retrospect, Bakbone, Atempo or Archiware.