Time Machine UI non-responsive for single user - due to Samsung SSD read defect

This is informational - no question. It's an unusual Time Machine problem that may be of interest.
Every month or so I test my Time Capsule backups with a routine restore. Recenly that failed -- the Time Machine Restore UI did no respond to mouse or keyboard actions. The rest of Time Machine behaved normally -- I could cancel or select a backup. Beyond that - no response. Very occasionally, if I waited a while, I could change directories.
On further testing my other user accounts worked normally. The problem was only with one account -- the account with by far the heaviest use. I wiped my Time Capsule drive and recreated my 3 machine backups but the problem persisted. Repairing disk permissions had no effect. Repairing my Samsung EVO SSD disk from the emergency partition disk utility did help -- but repair took an unusually long time.
Answer - I think this was related to the Samsung EVO SSD read bug. [1] My guess is that some parts of my SSD related to directory structure were becoming extremely slow to read, and this caused something in Time Machine to hang (maybe if I'd waited 30 min or so it would have become responsive, I think my SSD was very close to compete failure). After applying the EVO SSD fix my SSD was far faster (startup went from 20 sec to about 1-2 sec) and Time Machine restore, while not zippy, behaved normally.
[1] http://tech.kateva.org/2014/11/samsung-ssd-840-evo-has-slow-read-bug.html

Thanks for the reminder.. I just replaced my hard disk in 2011 mini with a 500GB Samsung 840 evo which looked cheapest and fine for what I wanted... it was like a few days before this info came out.. so I have not experienced any slow down.. I had around 100GB on the drive.. so I followed the instructions..
Created a boot USB using the iso from samsung on a windows machine using http://rufus.akeo.ie/
This was really simple.. so if you have access to a windows just do it this way.
Plug the USB into the Mac and hold options at boot and then select windows from the selection of boot devices. It came up with a very familiar DOS screen and I was able to do the firmware upgrade and repair.. took around 30min so no biggie..
I think as long as you have plenty of free space these things are fairly easy.

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Good question.. yes, it should.
http://pondini.org/TM/2.html

I created a form with Single Choice fields, 4 days with times listed. But, I want the user to only be able to choose one time, and the time chosen to be unavailable for other users. How do I do this?

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I'm afraid not. It's not rocket science but you need to do some coding.
You'll need to find a script (php) and save it to your local site folder. Then reference the script in your form's action attribute like so.
<form action="path/form-to-email-script.php" >
The input fields in your HTML form need to exactly match the script variables.
I'm assuming you're hosted on a Linux server which uses PHP code. Linux servers are also case sensitive, so upper case names are not the same as lower case names. It's usually best to use all lower case names in your form and script to avoid confusion.
Related Links:
Formm@ailer PHP from DB Masters
http://dbmasters.net/index.php?id=4
Tectite
http://www.tectite.com/formmailpage.php
If this is all a bit beyond your skill set, look at:
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http://wufoo.com/
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Agreed. This particular glitch doesn't affect a lot of users, apparenly, and Apple is aware of it and hopefully it will be fixed soon.
I've learned over the years (mostly the hard way, of course ), never to trust my backups to a single app or piece of hardware: no app is perfect, and all hardware fails, sooner or later.
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CCC is donationware; SD has a free version, but you need the paid one (about $30) to do updates instead of full replacements, or scheduling. Either is easily found via Google.
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Message was edited by: Pondini

Can't exec /bin/sh for single user

Hi,
When I boot up my iMac G5 it sits on the gray screen with the apple and spinning "doing something" icon, and then goes to a terminal window telling me:
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Hi Mungo,
invalid key length is a serious issue that can sometimes be fixed by "heavy duty" utilites like DiskWarrior and Drive Genius.
If you don't have enough room to re-install the OS, though, you have seriously overfilled it and they may not be able to deal with the problem either.
You should always aim to keep at least 15% free space on the drive, preferably more. On my 250 Gig internal drive, for example, I see the beginning of stability and speed problems when I get down to below around 30 gigs of free space. It varies a bit depending on what you use your Mac for, but my own preference is to always aim for 50 Gigs free on this 250 Gig drive.
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The best solution is to reformat the drive. It is unlikely that it actually needs replacing. However I still think you should buy another drive, but an external one, if you don't have one already.
My approach to your problem would be:
1) Go and buy a nice big external firewire drive if you don't have one already (ideally at least twice the size of your internal).
2) Install OSX on the external drive (You may want to partition it into two volumes first, keeping one partition to store a "cloned backup" of your internal and one for general usage, overflow storage, etc)
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4) Reformat the internal drive, preferably using the single "zeroing" option.
5) Re-install the OS and software on your internal drive
6) Copy back your data (documents, music, movies etc) to your internal but make sure you leave plenty of free space on it. If you have a large music library , or lots of movies, for example, you might want to keep them on the external, rather than putting them back)
7) From now on use one partition of your external drive for regular "cloned" backups of the internal and the other for general storage overflow etc.
Cheers
Rod

Is there a way to access Time Machine files associated with an old user name?

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Does this make sense to Mac experts out there?
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Right. Here's what the permissions look like from the Finder Command I:
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Can I set up multiple usb hard drives- one for time machine and a second for media?
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Can one also print wirelessly with an old HP C6280 printer?
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Is there a way to combine two backups on separate disks created by time machine into one on a single disk?

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weekly backups for all previous months
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Thanks!
-- Jim

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Hello, gurus!
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Time Machine UI non-responsive for single user - due to Samsung SSD read defect

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