Moving to a Mac

Do a web search on these problems with connecting to NAS Servers, and you'll find it's well known, and has been a problem for at least two years.   I haven't tried to do anything strange with this Mac, and the NAS Connect problem appeared solved, and then became much worse.  I even read the on-line manual type thingy on the Apple Support pages, rather than clicking buttons/icons at random. If I can't solve it in the next 2 days it may well be going back for a refund. (I believe I have 14 days to do this)

And the network shares have suddenly reappeared.  No idea why - unless ...

They appeared under the "shared" heading on the sidebar.  Could I perhaps have inadvertently clicked on the "hide" message next to the heading?  Don't think I did, because when they disappeared   I wasn't doing anything to the Finder window, which was just left open while I was installing PhotoScore.   I'll copy this to my other thread in Streaming Audio.

Hi Dungassin,

Regarding your posts, I am not quite sure If this may be the same problem for Mavericks but please be aware that OSX Lion and Mountain Lion do not support SAMBA v1 folder sharing which is what the UnitiServe uses and this could possibly be the cause of your problem?????

Jason.

Thanks, but I don't own a Unitiserve.  Until now my rips have been done using a Windows laptop with dBpoweramp, storing them on a QNAP NAS.

The problems I describe were, I believe, first seen on Lion about 3 years ago, and have still not been definitively fixed.

Dear John,

What is the total size or your files for music and other significant things like photographs.

I may have a simple solution for you.

ATB from George

Yes, I have seen this problem with the network drives for a long time, sometimes they appear, sometimes they disappear on the Finder sidebar. But I can't be bothered because I have other windows servers, laptops.

I believe there are some workarounds, some claim some workarounds work, others say they just a waste of time. 

If the nas disappears from the sidebar, just go to the GO menu in Finder and re-connect.  Takes 5 seconds, and really doesn't bother me.  But my Synology nas never disappears; never.

 Well, George, off the top of my head, IIRC, approximately ...

4TB x 2 (RAID 1) QNAP NAS : Music for NDS 2.9 TB

2 TB Buffalo NAS : Photos + Videos 700 GB, Audiobooks/ Radio Comedy Shows 150 GB,  iTunes Media 15 GB, Other stuff 100 GB.

I suppose I really ought to have a clear-out.  

It is not that simple, Bart - sometimes it is the router firmware, sometimes it is the setup, the configuarations, sometimes it is some incompatibilities between different systems, etc. I think you are one of the few lucky ones who do not have that issue.

Just google the issues, apparently quite a few of us who are experiencing this issue.

But as said before, I can't be bothered with it.

Ah! I Must have been half asleep and thinking about somethibg else at the time.

Hope you get it sorted.

Jason.

Dear John,

I think that the amount of storage you are providing with you NAS is so large that my simple plan is impractical. I was thinking of using on-board hard drive to store your files.

That is how I do it. 391 GB of music files and almost nothing else. 

Sorry not to have a solution for you.

ATB from George

There is a better solution. Having been frustrated by NAS devices in the past, I just use mine for backup. All my music and photo files are stored on a Drobo HD 6-bay storage device, bought on the recommendation of Mr Fixedwheel of this parish, which has worked immaculately for a number of years now. It'll store up to 16TB. Which is a lot, and you can pull out or pop in HD drives with it running.

That's basically what I'm already doing, Tony, except that I have 2 NAS drives.  Don't  have enough hard drive space on the Mac to keep all my files there (although it did come with a 3TB Fusion drive!  The external drives are really just to back up the files kept on the NAS drives.  The reason I have 2 NAS drives is that my first one was the 2TB Buffalo, and when it became apparent that was not enough I bought the QNAP and put 2 x 4TB Hitachi drives in it.

I liked Syncback Pro, because it was very easy to configure different profiles for mirror/synchronise tasks, as I have a collection of external hard drives ranging in size from 80GB to 4TB (long story, and not very interesting), so I tend to keep various hard drives for different categories of task, making it easy to follow the belt and braces approach of keeping 2 external backups of each set of data, with one of each kept off-site.  My youngest son-in-law does the same, and I store his off-site backups in my study.  When we meet, we swap drives which contain altered information from the previous time, and take away the latest version of each other's backup.  Perhaps some would see this approach as a bit 'anal', but it keeps us both happy.

Still enjoying your Active DBLs? 

Hi John,

Yes thanks, they're definitely keepers. My wife says I'll probably be buried in one.  I have a frisson of concern she might have something more immediate than I planned in mind...

It seems you're using things round the other way to me; i.e. using your NAS as primary storage and HDs as backup. I originally owned a Qnap NAS but the company stopped support for the latest Mac DOS, so I moved to a Buffalo NAS. The Mac has no problem recognising this and Time Machine backs up to it just fine.

I've still got the active SBLs in the living room system.  Sound superb on the end of a 4-pack of 135s.

You're correct, I'm using the NAS drives as primary storage for music, audio books, photos, videos.

The other stuff on them is backup from the main computer.

Funnily enough, my QNAP drive is working better with the Mac than the Buffalo one, now that I've sorted out how to mount it.  The Buffalo won't let me connect to it as a registered user, so I'm connecting as 'guest'.   For some reason it doesn't seem to like my username or possibly my password, although both of these work fine when I look at the Buffalo with NAS Navigator 2.  Puzzling.

Still getting to terms with the Mac keyboard (I have the wired numeric version), e.g. I keep hitting the wrong keys for @ and ", and I had to go on-line to find out how to get the # symbol (Option-3, if you didn't know!).  I use # a lot when entering chord names into Sibelius (music notation software). Still hitting CTRL when I should be using COMMAND.  Still, that will change with time and further practice.

Anybody know how to stop the very loud iMAC startup sound, other than turning sound off completely and only turning it back on when you want it? (Windows had the same annoying trait)

My first proper day with the Macbook Pro and so far all is going well.  I like the lit up keyboard and the build and finish are a big step beyond even the Sony Vaio.  I'm getting used to the trackpad gestures and really liking them.  

A few minor niggles regarding how OS deals with files but that's probably just because I'm not used to it yet.

The only major drag is that I can't find the MAC discs I have for programs like Photoshop.  I have had to buy MS Office afresh as well.  Oh, and Terratec haven't got up to date Mac drivers (64 bit) for the DMX192 USB ADC that I use for recording analog to digital.  That's a real drag and means I'll either have to get a Windows machine for recording or else a different ADC entirely.  I haven't tried the laser printer or scanner yet...

Or you could try something like Parallels or VMWare Fusion so that you can run a Windows OS (and the programs you prefer) on your MBP. I use VMWare Fusion and it works well. Problem is you will have to buy it plus the cost of say Windows 7... so the costs start to mount up. 

I found the Mac learning curve passed much more quickly than I expected, Richard, so hang in there. You'll love it soon enough.

The Apple Magic mouse is great to use with the Mac Richard. I use the trackpad and mouse (left hand/right hand) and find it alleviates any repetitive stress problems, as well as being fast.

If you want to avoid going to Photoshop give Gimp a try  - it is free. If you want something that is very Mac compatible try Pixelmator from the App store it is £20 - look out for the Tutorials on YouTube and the Pixelmator web site

With you on this Jota.  I am a long term Windows user and never see the kind of problems on Windows that Mac converts crow about.  I am now retired but I was an IT professional for many years and just about all of my clients were Windows users.  Which is basically why I am a Windows user.

The only company we worked with who were Apple users were a small oil exploration company in London's West End.  But the MD had an office with 4 or 5 PAs and insisted on using a little Mac network, everyone else used a Windows machine connected to the servers in the machine room.  So we had to back up all his HDs remotely etc etc - it was a nightmare and something like 80% of our call-out time was to support those damn Macs and their 'clunky' network.

There was also a geologist who insisted on using a top of the range Mac and even though we asked him to please keep us in the loop if he was getting new stuff installed on his machine, he just ignored us.  But blamed us when things went wrong.  One day he came up to me in a real lather.  "Your PC network has caused my Mac to crash" he said - yup we had to back him up too.  On investigation it turned out he had got a Mac dealer to install a piece of security software on his Mac (without telling us)and it wouldn't let him in.  To cut a long story short we contacted the people in the US who had created this little software gem and was told that we were running the wrong version of the OS and it was no problem to fix.  Good I said.  Yup they said just take the HD out of the Mac and mail it to their office somewhere near Stinson beach in California.  I couldn't take the smile off my face for days after that, almost as long as it took for his HD to come back from the US of A.

So me use an Apple?  Well yes I have an iPad just to drive my NAIM streamer and apart from it being much too expensive for its spec it is a good little box.  But would I purchase a laptop or desktop Apple computer? Nah don't think so.

Nope on Windows and I suspect on the Mac you can turn any sound effect off if you don't want it and I thought everyone turned off the annoying logon 'ber blupperty bloop bloop'.

I'm sure a lot of guys have moved to Apple products from earlier far less stable versions of MS products. However stable new versions are I can't see too many changing back.

That's fine and I guess you are right.  But when you read a series of posts from Mac converts then, if you didn't know better, you would think that Windows never actually worked.  But the truth of the matter is that most large corps are Windows based, Windows machines are often used as file servers, web servers, app servers and database servers, whereas Macs seldom (if ever) are.  It's not uncommon to find that a Windows database is up and serving and has been for over a year.  So they can't be that bad.

I agree with @BigH47.

The issue here is that forums portray a biased view and allows users with a very specific over state a 'problem'.  The real expertise for mac solutions are with Apple and the Apple Support communities.

Not all Coporates use Windows servers.  The vast majority use unix based servers or a combination of Windows and Unix (in the case of databses, Oracle feature highly).

J