iDisk Acting Funky
Posted July 24th, 2008 @ 08:54pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I keep my Scorecard database and license on my iDisk. I then alias the "Scorecard" folder to Application Support. I also export my rounds (HTML) to the "Web" folder on my iDisk so that they are automatically synchronized to my Mobile Me account (see them here).
This setup worked beautifully in the .Mac days. Back then I was still using the "Sites" folder (which pointed at homepage.mac.com/iacas/ instead of web.me.com/iacas/).
Since .Mac became MobileMe, the process has become slow, slow, slow.For example, in Scorecard, I'll create a new round. This writes out a change to the database (an alias in my Application Support folder points to iDisk/Documents/Scorecard/). Scorecard will spin the little rainbow wheel for about a minute before the DB change is written, but it's also already synchronized online.
Then I'll select the latest round, hit cmd-E to export it, and two HTML files (one for that round as well as the index file) are written to iDisk/Web/Sites/Scorecard/ ((A CSS and a JavaScript file are also sometimes written to disk.)). Scorecard will again beachball for about a minute until the files are written, and again they're immediately available "in the cloud" - i.e. online at the URL linked to above).
Back in the .Mac days, these changes were written immediately because my iDisk was merely a local .sparseimage file. What gives with this bizarre, slower way of doing things? It's obnoxious and slow. And why do I have a volume named "iacas-1" in my /Volumes/? Heck, one time last week I had iacas-2, iacas-3, iacas-4, and iacas-5 in there!
Here's what it looks like.
lrwxr-xr-x 1 iacas admin 14 Jul 15 18:41 iDisk@ -> /Volumes/iacas
drwx------ 13 iacas iacas 816 Jul 19 15:32 iacas/
drwx------ 1 iacas iacas 2048 Jul 24 20:47 iacas-1/
drwxr-xr-x 1 iacas admin 2048 Jul 24 20:47 iacas-2/
Oddly, I can rm -r iacas-2 with seemingly no ill effect. I'm not sure why it's there. My MobileMe preferences say "iDisk Sync: On" and "Update: Automatically." This is no different than it was when MobileMe was .Mac.
And I still have a local sparse image file. It's located at /Users/iacas/Library/FileSync/hexstring/iacas_iDisk.sparsebundle. Unfortunately, it says it was last updated July 15, which is probably the last time I tried to fix this problem by turning iDisk Sync off and then back on again.
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Posted 26 Jul 2008 at 9:40am #
`iacas-2` and the like come from mounting a disk called `iacas` when the system thinks there is already one already mounted.
Posted 26 Jul 2008 at 10:13am #
[quote comment="48644"]`iacas-2` and the like come from mounting a disk called `iacas` when the system thinks there is already one already mounted.[/quote]
Yes, but the only "iacas" disks that might mount would be my iDisk, and the OS should be smart enough to deal with that.
Posted 28 Jul 2008 at 9:46am #
[quote comment="48646"]the OS should be smart enough to deal with that.[/quote]
Someone I know (perhaps it is me) would say "shoulda, woulda, coulda".
Sounds like it should be reported as a bug. It could be even worse if the system is trying to write to /Volumes/iDisk and that is not pointing to the correct one. (Perhaps it is waiting for a time-out?)