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Scheduled activities: 3 launchd or DAS?

While macOS uses DAS-CTS to schedule hundreds of background activities, third-parties normally use launchd. Comes with a full diagram explaining DAS-CTS.

February 2, 2023 Macs, Technology

Backing up to network storage: checks and balances

Backing up with Time Machine to a NAS or other network storage is different. Here’s an account of how it creates and handles sparse bundle storage in Ventura 13.2.

February 1, 2023 Macs, Technology

Scheduled activities: 2 Running the activity

How running a background task takes a tiny fraction of second, although the task itself takes seconds or minutes, and why it’s run on E cores.

January 30, 2023 Macs, Technology

Scheduled activities: 1 Scheduling by DAS

How macOS schedules tasks like making automatic Time Machine backups, from property list to transactions between DAS and CTS.

January 23, 2023 Macs, Technology

How macOS schedules background activities

The story of how Mac OS X went from cron, to launchd, and ended up with Duet Activity Scheduler, to schedule background activities like backups.

January 21, 2023 Macs, Technology

Lightweight VMs are sparse files, and how to keep them compact

Virtual Machines for lightweight virtualisation on Apple silicon Macs rely on sparse files. Here are tips to ensure they stay small and don’t explode to full size.

January 5, 2023 Macs, Technology

Spotlight problems: mds_stores and mdworker in trouble

Excessive CPU use by mds_stores is a common cause of sluggish performance. Explains what it does and what you can do bring it under control.

December 8, 2022 Macs, Technology

Disk Utility and Time Machine in Ventura

Has Ventura brought any relief from Disk Utility’s inability to run First Aid on Time Machine’s backups, and what about changes in Time Machine itself?

November 9, 2022 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: Do you still need that external bootable disk?

In the past, a second, cloned bootable volume on a separate disk was a great advantage. Cloning has become harder, and Recovery better. What should you do now?

October 2, 2022 Macs, Technology

Copy, clone, backup: is there a difference?

Copies, clones and backups are three different things. Here their differences are explained with examples from APFS and modern macOS.

October 1, 2022 Macs, Technology

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