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Totus Copy

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Early this morning I released Totus Copy.  Totus Copy is a utility that was born out of necessity.  As some of you may know, I work as an Apple Certified Technician. I see a lot of failing and plain out dead hard drives in my line of work. I also spend a lot of time painfully pulling data off failing hard drives. 


Once we get a hard drive showing in the bus, there is still a lot of work left to do. OS X doesn't have what is referred to as resumable copying.  What this means is that if a file fails in the middle of a copy, the entire copy will fail. This is all well and good for normal use, but for copying data where you expect 20% or more of it to fail, it is a total pain in the butt. You can spend many hours locked in front of a system.


What Totus Copy does is solve this critical problem. If a file fails, Totus Copy will attempt to retrieve as much data as possible.  It will then move onto the next file and continue the process.  Many technicians know the pain of going directory-by-directory trying to salvage as much data as possible. Totus Copy makes this a problem of the past. 


While writing and field-testing Totus Copy over the last several months, an impressive feature set was developed that makes this software a very practical and powerful data recovery tool.  It has the ability to skip over invisible files or applications and you can set it to target specific directories or files of a certain type. It will never transfer a bundle or a directory rather it recreates them. Totus Copy will never give up and has been known to grab working copies of files that other data recovery tools left behind. 


Totus Copy will unquestionably save data that would otherwise been lost.


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My Macworld Opinions

I think we will almost definitely see a 16 GB iPhone, there has been some industry speculation on a 32 GB iPhone but I think we aren't there yet. We will more then likely see the push of the 1.1.3 patch which has been public for couple of weeks now on the internet. As far as iPhone 2.0 less then 1% chance, we aren't there yet, check back in 12 months. 

With the Mac Pro's and Xserves updated right before the event I think that area will be left untouched, there is a slight chance (10%) of a CTO blue-ray option but I wouldn't hold my breath. The only reason I can see it being delayed is Apple wants to use Macworld as a platform to announce its full support of Blue-Ray.

Moderate chance of iMac speed bump, also the slight chance of Blue-Ray CTO on them.

Macbook Pros although not typically upgraded during Macworld will most likely see a revision. They are long overdue for a form redesign and this might be the time to fit in with the rumored ultra-portable macbook pro. 

The ultra-portable laptop will almost certainly be a macbook pro as opposed to a macbook and has a very very high chance of release. The chance of using flash storage as the only HD is very slim still the size doesnt warrant the cost yet. Now using a smaller flash drive to store OS is possible, not going to rule that one out.

I doubt there will be any iPod changes

I doubt there will be any macbook changes

10.5.2 Will be released in the coming weeks, whether they do it at macworld or not is anyone's guess.

iLife and iWork will go untouched, they will continue the trend of not being updated at macworlds. 

Displays are due for the some update love but I don't think we are there yet, I figure they would of bumped them at the same time as the towers and xserves. 

Macbooks and Mac Minis should be fairly safe from revision for a while still. 

The rumor mill has been pretty quite this time around (all things considered) and there was no pre-warning on the Pros or Xserves so the chances of a pre-show leak are slim. 

In the end it is anyones guess, I hope I am right but we wont know till the keynote. 
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Tethering the iPhone for OS X

So I am leaving this week to drive 10,000 Miles, which I will be posting more about later. At the same time I am enrolled in college and have some course work to complete. I will of course have my laptop with me but I was a little nervous about being able to find wifi hotspots out in the middle of nowhere America.


I do have my iPhone of course but it does not have a decent text editor nor does it provide me an ideal platform for doing school work or prolonged web browsing. The solution? I needed to tether my laptop to my iPhone.


For those of you who are not familiar with tethering, it is when you use your cell phone signal as a method of connecting your laptop to the internet. In the case of the iPhone I will be using EDGE to get online. Its not fast but it will do the job.


Below I will provide very detailed instructions on getting this going, not because it is too hard but because there are a lot of uninformed people out there that might want to try this.


Instructions after the jump

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