I don't see any reason not to have a Finder on the disk. People messing up their computers... what the hell are you smoking? This would allow them to get their files off the ship before it sinks and then format.
Assuming that Disk Utility can't fix it, and assuming that another utility can't fix it, you're in deep guacamole.
If you move a file, you can lose it.
If you try and copy a file, you are likely to get garbage.
Doing *anything* on the drive in such a condition has a high chance of just making it worse, spreading the corruption. Copying files off assuming they're good is just a false sense of security.
This is when you go grab your most recent backup, or you grab another machine and try Target Mode, or you try getting in through a network. Basically, if a drive is hosed, you don't want to do anything with it, until you can get it to a professional recovery service.
Which is why you back up. The time to get your files off the sinking ship is before trouble starts - once it does, you're just playing the odds, and they're usually against you.
I'd like to see a read-only solution included to give a best effort at file copying, but a full Finder? I'm not convinced it would do much but cause more trouble than good in cases where Disk Utility and other disk recovery apps have failed. Remember, if they work, then you don't need Finder on the recovery disc, I'm talking about the only time you'd need it - when the repair attempts have all failed. It's a seriously FUBARd drive when that happens. Trust me, I've had a few.
Assuming that Disk Utility can't fix it, and assuming that another utility can't fix it, you're in deep guacamole.
If you move a file, you can lose it.
If you try and copy a file, you are likely to get garbage.
Doing *anything* on the drive in such a condition has a high chance of just making it worse, spreading the corruption. Copying files off assuming they're good is just a false sense of security.
This is when you go grab your most recent backup, or you grab another machine and try Target Mode, or you try getting in through a network. Basically, if a drive is hosed, you don't want to do anything with it, until you can get it to a professional recovery service.
Which is why you back up. The time to get your files off the sinking ship is before trouble starts - once it does, you're just playing the odds, and they're usually against you.
I'd like to see a read-only solution included to give a best effort at file copying, but a full Finder? I'm not convinced it would do much but cause more trouble than good in cases where Disk Utility and other disk recovery apps have failed. Remember, if they work, then you don't need Finder on the recovery disc, I'm talking about the only time you'd need it - when the repair attempts have all failed. It's a seriously FUBARd drive when that happens. Trust me, I've had a few.
Assuming that Disk Utility can't fix it, and assuming that another utility can't fix it, you're in deep guacamole.
If you move a file, you can lose it.
If you try and copy a file, you are likely to get garbage.
Doing *anything* on the drive in such a condition has a high chance of just making it worse, spreading the corruption. Copying files off assuming they're good is just a false sense of security.
This is when you go grab your most recent backup, or you grab another machine and try Target Mode, or you try getting in through a network. Basically, if a drive is hosed, you don't want to do anything with it, until you can get it to a professional recovery service.
Which is why you back up. The time to get your files off the sinking ship is before trouble starts - once it does, you're just playing the odds, and they're usually against you.
I'd like to see a read-only solution included to give a best effort at file copying, but a full Finder? I'm not convinced it would do much but cause more trouble than good in cases where Disk Utility and other disk recovery apps have failed. Remember, if they work, then you don't need Finder on the recovery disc, I'm talking about the only time you'd need it - when the repair attempts have all failed. It's a seriously FUBARd drive when that happens. Trust me, I've had a few.
But Disk Utility isn't that great to use and isn't as intuitive as the Finder. There needs to be a solution to accessing a computer that will not start - Target Disk Mode is all very good if you have another computer but if you just want to get some work on a Flash drive for an urgent project there's no solution.
[B]But Disk Utility isn't that great to use and isn't as intuitive as the Finder.
Um... they do two different things. If your disk is bad, using the Finder is more than likely just going to screw it up *MORE*.
Am I the only one that sees this? Seriously.
Finder reads/writes data from/to the disk. Finder does so assuming the disk is in good shape. Finder does not have any sort of error checking ability.
Using such an app on a drive that is bad is asking for serious trouble. If you consult with a disk recovery pro, the first thing they tell you is that if you think your drive is bad, *stop using it*. Every write to disk has the opportunity to wipe out more data, if the drive's maps are hosed.
Now, what I said I *would* like to see is a dedicated read-only app that will *only* let you extract files from a bad disk if possible. That's all. That *WOULD* be what you all are asking for the Finder for, right? Saving files off before a reformat?
You don't need a full Finder for that, you need something more akin to Backup. That's all. More to the point, that's all you *want*. Allowing someone to use the full Finder on a disk they think is bad (which is, you have to admit, when you use a bootable disk), just offers up much more of a potential problem than a solution. Especially when the potential solution can be done so elegantly by a specialized backup and extraction app.
Even better, Disk Utility already has most of the infrastructure built in for this sort of thing, and is a natural place to put it. 'Extract files' would let you target a second volume, and then pick and choose which files you'd want to copy. DU already knows how to check and verify disk structures, so it can flag files as residing in suspected bad locations, etc, so you know ahead of time if that file is likely to be good. Teh w!n.
Quote:
There needs to be a solution to accessing a computer that will not start - Target Disk Mode is all very good if you have another computer but if you just want to get some work on a Flash drive for an urgent project there's no solution.
Well there is in the Terminal, but it's not as easy as what you're looking for, no. To say there's no solution is a bit disingenuous, since it *can* be done. It just isn't as easy as it could be, I agree, and I think a file extraction utility would be a great addition to the utility/bootable CD.
But a full Finder? No. Bad idea. If the drive is going, or is corrupted, the user needs to get that fixed *first* before being lulled into a false sense of security.
But a full Finder? No. Bad idea. If the drive is going, or is corrupted, the user needs to get that fixed *first* before being lulled into a false sense of security.
i agree with you entirely - a full-finder is not needed we do need a Graphical interface for this though.
But for example, when my partition tables got corrupted when Software Update decided to install half-complete Mac OS X updates, I was able to boot into Mac OS X for just enough time for a few file copies.
These files were good. They work fine. They weren't files that were touched by the update whatsoever.
But it would always freeze up after a minute or so of being booted, so I'd have to cross my fingers and get a few files to a CD, reboot, and repeat. This would have been easy if I had had a Finder on the install disk.
But for example, when my partition tables got corrupted when Software Update decided to install half-complete Mac OS X updates, I was able to boot into Mac OS X for just enough time for a few file copies.
These files were good. They work fine. They weren't files that were touched by the update whatsoever.
But it would always freeze up after a minute or so of being booted, so I'd have to cross my fingers and get a few files to a CD, reboot, and repeat. This would have been easy if I had had a Finder on the install disk.
It would have been just as easy if you had had ANY file copy utility on the install disk. Why do you think you'd need to have the entire Finder?
That's what I'm trying to point out - every example I've seen in this thread for why the Finder is 'needed' has been to move files off to another volume, and that's it. You don't need the entire frickin' Finder for that, and the entire Finder includes the ability to just hose a failing drive even worse. It's a sledgehammer to drive a finishing nail.
So have a copy-only utility instead, and not the Finder. Problem solved, no new problems introduced. Simple.
Cripes, give it a Finder-esque interface if you like, I don't care, but make it copy-only, period.
Good engineering is about knowing what *not* to include, as well as what *to* include.
As far as I can tell from this thread, everyone's requirement is "Move files to a known good volume in the case of a failing or corrupted disk" This is a very reasonable request, and one that I *agree* should be taken care of.
Yes, the Finder can do this. It is one of a few hundred (or thousand) things the Finder can do - and many of the other things have the potential to make the scenario leading to the requirement *worse*. So now it comes down to - do you include all of it, and just tell the user "Don't do that", or do you just make sure from the beginning that the malignant behaviours are not even doable? Good engineering says the latter. MS says the former.
A better solution is one that meets the requirements (copy files to another volume) without bringing any new problems into the equation. That's what's needed, not the entire Finder.
It would be good to be able to do work as well - but for obvious practical reasons this is not recommended which is why no-one suggested it! Although if you could use programs with the Cd which meant the hard drive wasn't written to it would be good. For example if you only have one mac and the hard drive fail and you wanted to finish off a project.
Actually, I was thinking further why the Finder may not be included: virtual memory.
Disk Utility and Terminal are both small-footprint apps. They don't pull in a lot of the frameworks. A few, but certainly nowhere near the mass that Finder does.
So why does this matter?
By default, the VM swapfiles are written to the boot volume. Except if your boot volume is read-only... then what?
Well sure, you can use whatever available disk is there... but remember, the context we're talking about is when you have *one* machine with *one* drive, and the drive is *bad*. Sooooo, do you really want to be writing possible a gig of data to a bad drive, and wipe out the very data you want to recover? Heck no. Remember, a bad drive means it can't really remember where things are. Your project that's due tomorrow that you want to work on 'real quick' might end up getting written right over the top of. Oopsie.
When booting from a CD, in the case of a bad drive, you're going to be limited to the physical RAM on hand. If you have 2GB, sure, Finder is probably just fine. If you have 256MB though, no way. Finder is simply too big.
Which brings us back to a small, dedicated utility.
If you have a bad drive, job #1 is getting it back into shape before using it for anything, and that includes VM.
OS9's System Folder was a nightmare for most users. "I thought I'd clean it up, so I threw away everything I didn't recognize." "Just throw everything in there, it'll figure it out." "Extension conflict? What's an extension?"
And you're right, you shouldn't be mucking around in /System. Why? Apple provided two other places for you to muck around in, where you're guaranteed not to screw something up irreparably: /Library and ~/Library. Get over the name similarity, /System != System Folder. /System == what makes your machine work. /Library and ~/Library == how you customize your environment.
I find OS X users are much *MORE* likely to be plunging into the Libraries because they know it's almost impossible to royally screw over their systems, unlike in the OS9 days.
Wow. Talk about completely different perspectives.
My girlfriends dad was doing some cleanup and threw away all his iPhoto photos. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but he obviously didn't make the connection between the "iPhoto Library" folder in ~/photos and what is shown in iPhoto. Lucky for him he had most of the photos synced to his iPod, albeit at low resolution. Good thing for him that he doesn't really care and I would question if he'd even notice the difference between the sizes if I didn't say anything.
My girlfriends dad was doing some cleanup and threw away all his iPhoto photos. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but he obviously didn't make the connection between the "iPhoto Library" folder in ~/photos and what is shown in iPhoto. Lucky for him he had most of the photos synced to his iPod, albeit at low resolution. Good thing for him that he doesn't really care and I would question if he'd even notice the difference between the sizes if I didn't say anything.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the comparison between the three Library structure vs. System Folder...
"I threw away my Word Documents folder and now my Word files are gone!?" \
Anyone thought about user-security. OS9 had none, OSX as any UNIX-system has a lot. When you boot from your CD/DVD you need to log in as a user. What are the privileges you want to have: Administrator, Root? You will need privileges to access the data from the other accounts. But this way you create a system that can boot easily into Administrator without knowing one password. Looks like a security-hole to me.
OS9's System Folder was a nightmare for most users. "I thought I'd clean it up, so I threw away everything I didn't recognize." "Just throw everything in there, it'll figure it out." "Extension conflict? What's an extension?"
And you're right, you shouldn't be mucking around in /System. Why? Apple provided two other places for you to muck around in, where you're guaranteed not to screw something up irreparably: /Library and ~/Library. Get over the name similarity, /System != System Folder. /System == what makes your machine work. /Library and ~/Library == how you customize your environment.
I find OS X users are much *MORE* likely to be plunging into the Libraries because they know it's almost impossible to royally screw over their systems, unlike in the OS9 days.
Wow. Talk about completely different perspectives.
Actually, im on the OS9 System Folder is more intuitive team. I mastered everything about the OS8 system folder as a 10 year old, but im still having problems trying to fix OSX's unix problems.
Granted that some problems has become a lot easier (Extension problems), but the overall easyness has declined imo.
What do Open/Save dialogue boxes take up in terms of memory? Does the finder/its subservices have to be launched for Open/Save dialogues to display file contents? Because that's really all that's needed: a really simple Finder that can display the contents of folders, and be able to burn them to a CD/send them to a USB device.
Comments
Originally posted by dobby
OSX is unix and thats why there is no finder.
Apple expect a non-techie to be able to use the terminal
If Apple expected that, they wouldn't even bundle the Finder with OS X...
Are we both understanding this the same way?
Assuming that Disk Utility can't fix it, and assuming that another utility can't fix it, you're in deep guacamole.
If you move a file, you can lose it.
If you try and copy a file, you are likely to get garbage.
Doing *anything* on the drive in such a condition has a high chance of just making it worse, spreading the corruption. Copying files off assuming they're good is just a false sense of security.
This is when you go grab your most recent backup, or you grab another machine and try Target Mode, or you try getting in through a network. Basically, if a drive is hosed, you don't want to do anything with it, until you can get it to a professional recovery service.
Which is why you back up. The time to get your files off the sinking ship is before trouble starts - once it does, you're just playing the odds, and they're usually against you.
I'd like to see a read-only solution included to give a best effort at file copying, but a full Finder? I'm not convinced it would do much but cause more trouble than good in cases where Disk Utility and other disk recovery apps have failed. Remember, if they work, then you don't need Finder on the recovery disc, I'm talking about the only time you'd need it - when the repair attempts have all failed. It's a seriously FUBARd drive when that happens. Trust me, I've had a few.
Originally posted by Kickaha
A corrupted disk is nothing to screw around with.
Assuming that Disk Utility can't fix it, and assuming that another utility can't fix it, you're in deep guacamole.
If you move a file, you can lose it.
If you try and copy a file, you are likely to get garbage.
Doing *anything* on the drive in such a condition has a high chance of just making it worse, spreading the corruption. Copying files off assuming they're good is just a false sense of security.
This is when you go grab your most recent backup, or you grab another machine and try Target Mode, or you try getting in through a network. Basically, if a drive is hosed, you don't want to do anything with it, until you can get it to a professional recovery service.
Which is why you back up. The time to get your files off the sinking ship is before trouble starts - once it does, you're just playing the odds, and they're usually against you.
I'd like to see a read-only solution included to give a best effort at file copying, but a full Finder? I'm not convinced it would do much but cause more trouble than good in cases where Disk Utility and other disk recovery apps have failed. Remember, if they work, then you don't need Finder on the recovery disc, I'm talking about the only time you'd need it - when the repair attempts have all failed. It's a seriously FUBARd drive when that happens. Trust me, I've had a few.
Very nice post!
Originally posted by Kickaha
A corrupted disk is nothing to screw around with.
Assuming that Disk Utility can't fix it, and assuming that another utility can't fix it, you're in deep guacamole.
If you move a file, you can lose it.
If you try and copy a file, you are likely to get garbage.
Doing *anything* on the drive in such a condition has a high chance of just making it worse, spreading the corruption. Copying files off assuming they're good is just a false sense of security.
This is when you go grab your most recent backup, or you grab another machine and try Target Mode, or you try getting in through a network. Basically, if a drive is hosed, you don't want to do anything with it, until you can get it to a professional recovery service.
Which is why you back up. The time to get your files off the sinking ship is before trouble starts - once it does, you're just playing the odds, and they're usually against you.
I'd like to see a read-only solution included to give a best effort at file copying, but a full Finder? I'm not convinced it would do much but cause more trouble than good in cases where Disk Utility and other disk recovery apps have failed. Remember, if they work, then you don't need Finder on the recovery disc, I'm talking about the only time you'd need it - when the repair attempts have all failed. It's a seriously FUBARd drive when that happens. Trust me, I've had a few.
But Disk Utility isn't that great to use and isn't as intuitive as the Finder. There needs to be a solution to accessing a computer that will not start - Target Disk Mode is all very good if you have another computer but if you just want to get some work on a Flash drive for an urgent project there's no solution.
Originally posted by MacCrazy
[B]But Disk Utility isn't that great to use and isn't as intuitive as the Finder.
Um... they do two different things. If your disk is bad, using the Finder is more than likely just going to screw it up *MORE*.
Am I the only one that sees this? Seriously.
Finder reads/writes data from/to the disk. Finder does so assuming the disk is in good shape. Finder does not have any sort of error checking ability.
Using such an app on a drive that is bad is asking for serious trouble. If you consult with a disk recovery pro, the first thing they tell you is that if you think your drive is bad, *stop using it*. Every write to disk has the opportunity to wipe out more data, if the drive's maps are hosed.
Now, what I said I *would* like to see is a dedicated read-only app that will *only* let you extract files from a bad disk if possible. That's all. That *WOULD* be what you all are asking for the Finder for, right? Saving files off before a reformat?
You don't need a full Finder for that, you need something more akin to Backup. That's all. More to the point, that's all you *want*. Allowing someone to use the full Finder on a disk they think is bad (which is, you have to admit, when you use a bootable disk), just offers up much more of a potential problem than a solution. Especially when the potential solution can be done so elegantly by a specialized backup and extraction app.
Even better, Disk Utility already has most of the infrastructure built in for this sort of thing, and is a natural place to put it. 'Extract files' would let you target a second volume, and then pick and choose which files you'd want to copy. DU already knows how to check and verify disk structures, so it can flag files as residing in suspected bad locations, etc, so you know ahead of time if that file is likely to be good. Teh w!n.
There needs to be a solution to accessing a computer that will not start - Target Disk Mode is all very good if you have another computer but if you just want to get some work on a Flash drive for an urgent project there's no solution.
Well there is in the Terminal, but it's not as easy as what you're looking for, no. To say there's no solution is a bit disingenuous, since it *can* be done. It just isn't as easy as it could be, I agree, and I think a file extraction utility would be a great addition to the utility/bootable CD.
But a full Finder? No. Bad idea. If the drive is going, or is corrupted, the user needs to get that fixed *first* before being lulled into a false sense of security.
Originally posted by Kickaha
But a full Finder? No. Bad idea. If the drive is going, or is corrupted, the user needs to get that fixed *first* before being lulled into a false sense of security.
i agree with you entirely - a full-finder is not needed we do need a Graphical interface for this though.
These files were good. They work fine. They weren't files that were touched by the update whatsoever.
But it would always freeze up after a minute or so of being booted, so I'd have to cross my fingers and get a few files to a CD, reboot, and repeat. This would have been easy if I had had a Finder on the install disk.
This is a glaringly retarded screw up that I can't believe made it out the door after 10.1.
Originally posted by Placebo
But for example, when my partition tables got corrupted when Software Update decided to install half-complete Mac OS X updates, I was able to boot into Mac OS X for just enough time for a few file copies.
These files were good. They work fine. They weren't files that were touched by the update whatsoever.
But it would always freeze up after a minute or so of being booted, so I'd have to cross my fingers and get a few files to a CD, reboot, and repeat. This would have been easy if I had had a Finder on the install disk.
It would have been just as easy if you had had ANY file copy utility on the install disk. Why do you think you'd need to have the entire Finder?
That's what I'm trying to point out - every example I've seen in this thread for why the Finder is 'needed' has been to move files off to another volume, and that's it. You don't need the entire frickin' Finder for that, and the entire Finder includes the ability to just hose a failing drive even worse. It's a sledgehammer to drive a finishing nail.
So have a copy-only utility instead, and not the Finder. Problem solved, no new problems introduced. Simple.
Cripes, give it a Finder-esque interface if you like, I don't care, but make it copy-only, period.
Good engineering is about knowing what *not* to include, as well as what *to* include.
As far as I can tell from this thread, everyone's requirement is "Move files to a known good volume in the case of a failing or corrupted disk" This is a very reasonable request, and one that I *agree* should be taken care of.
Yes, the Finder can do this. It is one of a few hundred (or thousand) things the Finder can do - and many of the other things have the potential to make the scenario leading to the requirement *worse*. So now it comes down to - do you include all of it, and just tell the user "Don't do that", or do you just make sure from the beginning that the malignant behaviours are not even doable? Good engineering says the latter. MS says the former.
A better solution is one that meets the requirements (copy files to another volume) without bringing any new problems into the equation. That's what's needed, not the entire Finder.
Disk Utility and Terminal are both small-footprint apps. They don't pull in a lot of the frameworks. A few, but certainly nowhere near the mass that Finder does.
So why does this matter?
By default, the VM swapfiles are written to the boot volume. Except if your boot volume is read-only... then what?
Well sure, you can use whatever available disk is there... but remember, the context we're talking about is when you have *one* machine with *one* drive, and the drive is *bad*. Sooooo, do you really want to be writing possible a gig of data to a bad drive, and wipe out the very data you want to recover? Heck no. Remember, a bad drive means it can't really remember where things are. Your project that's due tomorrow that you want to work on 'real quick' might end up getting written right over the top of. Oopsie.
When booting from a CD, in the case of a bad drive, you're going to be limited to the physical RAM on hand. If you have 2GB, sure, Finder is probably just fine. If you have 256MB though, no way. Finder is simply too big.
Which brings us back to a small, dedicated utility.
If you have a bad drive, job #1 is getting it back into shape before using it for anything, and that includes VM.
Originally posted by Kickaha
If you have a bad drive, job #1 is getting it back into shape before using it for anything, and that includes VM.
Great post. That makes sense. We just need to bully Apple for 2GB standard RAM!
Originally posted by Kickaha
Are we all using the same system??
OS9's System Folder was a nightmare for most users. "I thought I'd clean it up, so I threw away everything I didn't recognize." "Just throw everything in there, it'll figure it out." "Extension conflict? What's an extension?"
And you're right, you shouldn't be mucking around in /System. Why? Apple provided two other places for you to muck around in, where you're guaranteed not to screw something up irreparably: /Library and ~/Library. Get over the name similarity, /System != System Folder. /System == what makes your machine work. /Library and ~/Library == how you customize your environment.
I find OS X users are much *MORE* likely to be plunging into the Libraries because they know it's almost impossible to royally screw over their systems, unlike in the OS9 days.
Wow. Talk about completely different perspectives.
My girlfriends dad was doing some cleanup and threw away all his iPhoto photos. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but he obviously didn't make the connection between the "iPhoto Library" folder in ~/photos and what is shown in iPhoto. Lucky for him he had most of the photos synced to his iPod, albeit at low resolution. Good thing for him that he doesn't really care and I would question if he'd even notice the difference between the sizes if I didn't say anything.
Originally posted by Xool
My girlfriends dad was doing some cleanup and threw away all his iPhoto photos. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but he obviously didn't make the connection between the "iPhoto Library" folder in ~/photos and what is shown in iPhoto. Lucky for him he had most of the photos synced to his iPod, albeit at low resolution. Good thing for him that he doesn't really care and I would question if he'd even notice the difference between the sizes if I didn't say anything.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the comparison between the three Library structure vs. System Folder...
"I threw away my Word Documents folder and now my Word files are gone!?"
Originally posted by Kickaha
I'm not sure what this has to do with the comparison between the three Library structure vs. System Folder...
"I threw away my Word Documents folder and now my Word files are gone!?"
Maybe he's lonely and fancy's a chat?
Originally posted by Kickaha
Are we all using the same system??
OS9's System Folder was a nightmare for most users. "I thought I'd clean it up, so I threw away everything I didn't recognize." "Just throw everything in there, it'll figure it out." "Extension conflict? What's an extension?"
And you're right, you shouldn't be mucking around in /System. Why? Apple provided two other places for you to muck around in, where you're guaranteed not to screw something up irreparably: /Library and ~/Library. Get over the name similarity, /System != System Folder. /System == what makes your machine work. /Library and ~/Library == how you customize your environment.
I find OS X users are much *MORE* likely to be plunging into the Libraries because they know it's almost impossible to royally screw over their systems, unlike in the OS9 days.
Wow. Talk about completely different perspectives.
Actually, im on the OS9 System Folder is more intuitive team. I mastered everything about the OS8 system folder as a 10 year old, but im still having problems trying to fix OSX's unix problems.
Granted that some problems has become a lot easier (Extension problems), but the overall easyness has declined imo.
but im still having problems trying to fix OSX's unix problems.
What the hell does this mean?