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son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
I feel like a suicide bomber who's tripped up and set himself off a bit early. I reformatted my Time Machine partition in order to start afresh and now Time Machine refuses to do anything. If I double click on the app. it just pouts at me and does nothing.
Mac Mini late 2009, OSX 10.8.5. Help!

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
Yippee! It just sprang back into life!!
I'll keep you posted.

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Glad it's working now Eric. Time Machine can sit a long time apparently doing nothing, especially when starting from scratch on a new disc. However, clicking on the little clock symbol in the menu bar (the one with the anticlockwise arrow round it) will probably show that it is "preparing backup". Depending on circumstances, this can take several hours!

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
It took five hours, but I'm feeling much better now! I'd been at a loose end and started worrying that my Mini was going to conk out, which posed the question of what to replace it with. What I'd like is a new seriously upgraded Mini but such a thing doesn't really exist. However, having slept on it I realise I don't actually need that;another one exactly the same would do.

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Tony Still
You could consider a second-hand Mini. If you upgraded it with an SSD in place of its (presumably ageing) HD, it would likely be fast enough and last for a few years.

I have found CEX (real shops as well as a web site) a good place to buy and sell gadgets. They offer an impressive two year warranty on hardware, presumably based on the tests they do when they buy them.

You'd probably have to contact somewhere like Marwell if you still need the young camel...

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
Anything with a two year guarantee sounds very attractive Tony, I'll have a look at CEX, thank you. I'll pass on that camel, I'll probably see a few in London next week.....

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
Just had a look at the CEX website, and although they have got a few tempting Minis there is very little technical information and no mention of a warranty; the shops must be different.

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Derek Wright
I have just received an email from OWC MacSales.Com they are a US based company they have some refurb Mac Minis for less than $200
send me your email address and I will forward the email to you.
I have bought stuff from them and they appear to be a reputable business

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
Thanks Derek, its [undisclosed email]

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Derek Wright
Done

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
Good man!
Ninety eight of them! ninety eight!
Weeding out the older ones I whittled it down to five, all late 2014. Still made my head spin though; Core i5, Core i7, 4Gb memory, 8Gb memory, 16Gb memory, small hard drive, large hard drive, etc, etc.....
I don't think the size of the hard drive is important as I shall back things up to an external LaCie.
Affinity Designer on my current Mini has trouble assembling three files totaling 1700MB. Is this caused by a shortage of memory (6GB,1067MHz)? Or by a slow processor (2.26GHz,Core 2 Duo)?

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Derek Wright
To help you compare machine performance use MacTracker from

http://mactracker.ca/

I think that most Mac Minis one can install larger capacity drives and in some cases more memory - MacTRacker will help you to find out the max memory capacity for a given Mini.

Good luck - looking at the web site of Minis is a bit like a kid in a toyshop.

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Tony Still
CEX warranty is here.

You can cross-reference the model number that CEX quotes to the spec on Wikipedia. Don't know why they don't quote the year-style model reference.

Best of luck.

Re: son of a camel!

Avatar Eric Jervis
Thanks Tony!
 
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