Friday, August 31, 2012

How to see free HD space on Mountain Lion

I have never thought I would need that, but found myself explaining the thing to my daughter the other day.

So here is an idea. By default on Mountain Lion there is no indication of drive's free space. If you area used to have it, open Finder / View and click to "Show Status Bar", as shown on the picture.


Now, carry on.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Incorrect free space indication in Finder

Apparently there is an unpleasant bug in Finder with Lion and Mountain Lion. Sometimes Finder status bar shows you much more free space than you actually have. 

To be sure, compare Disk Utility indication and Finder indication. Disk Utility is always correct. 

If you see that the numbers do not match, don't panic. It is actually fixable. There can be two reasons for Finder lying.

1. HD is corrupt. Try to repare it with Disk Utility, you may require reboot in Recovery mode to do that. To do that, press CMD + R when rebooting. Choose Disk Utility from the Recovery menu and go from there. Sometimes (happened to me) one iteration is not enough. It took me tree attempts to fix my SSD corruption. Sometimes you cannot recover the drive. I hope you have your Time Machine backups to restore from them. If not, boot, try to backup all you can and re-install.
2. If your drive is OK, but Finder still shows you ridiculous amount of free space, that might be Time Machine to blame.
In my case, when Time Machine automatic backups are enabled, Finder begins to lie. It seems that it add backup sizes to the free space, even if Time Machine drive is an external one. To fix this annoying issue, unmount Time machine drive, turn automate backups off and re-launch Finder. To restart Finder, do ALT + two finger click (right click with a mouse) and choose Relaunch. 

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Enabling FTP on with Mountain Lion


If you have Lion or Mountain Lion, you may mention that FTP option is gone from Sharing options.

No worries, FTP server is still there, even if it is a regular installation and not Server one.

No enable FTP server, run from Terminal.app

sudo -s launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

To disable, do unload instead of load.

FTP home directory is a users's home one.




Thursday, August 23, 2012

How to see hidden files in Finder

By default Finder does not show you the hidden files. If you ever need to see them there, do the following.

1. Open terminal and type in:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

2. Restart Finder app by holding ‘alt’ on the keyboard and right click on the Finder icon. Click on Relaunch.

If you need to revert to the previous state, do
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
and then re-launch Finder again.


Hello world

I have decided to start a different blog about my Mac experience. I will be documenting here findings, tricks and gotchas, just for myself.