Tag: ff0000

more backup adventures, this time with my macbook pro m1 max

whbeebe
Seagate Backup Plus Hub Drive 6T

Once upon a time, say back around 2016 or so, I purchased a monstrous (for the time) 6 TiB drive called the Seagate Backup Plus Hub Drive. I don’t recall how much I spent, but I’m pretty sure I purchased it from my local Costco, a brand they sold for many years until recently. I’m sure it was on sale at the time, being the cheap person I am. I used it for a few years, at least up until 2019, when I stopped using it and put it away in one of my cabinets. I can’t recall why I stopped using it, but it sat unused for about the next five years until today.

In the last post I wrote about backing up my iPhone 11. That’s all well and good, but until today I didn’t have a backup drive for this newest MacBook Pro. I’d tried to purchase another 5 TiB Seagate Backup Plus Portable from Costco, but the warehouse no longer carries them. When they did I could purchase them for $99, which isn’t bad at all. I have four of them already, for each of my various Macs. Looking online at both Amazon and Walmart, I can purchase a new one for about $160. When I saw the cost of those my memory was jogged a bit and I went and pulled out this now-old Seagate Backup.

macOS Disk Utility attempting to format Seagate Backup Plus Drive

The first thing I did was plug it into my MacBook, and sure enough it mounted and I was able to at least read the drive contents. The drive had come preformated as NTFS, because at the time I was still using my 17.2″ Samsung notebook computer and that backup drive’s primary use was meant for Windows 10 Pro. I used it for that purpose a number of times, but around late 2019 I began a hard switch to Linux and, of course, macOS. That switch is the reason why I pulled the Windows 10 SSD out of the Samsung and put in a fresh blank SSD, and then installed Linux Mint on it. Except for a Parallels VM with Windows 11 installed, I don’t run Windows on any of my personal systems any more.

Once the Seagate was plugged in and mounted, I attempted to reformat the drive as APFS with case sensitivity. Long story short, that’s the file system you should format on any drive meant for any contemporary Mac. I’ve read enough older junk on the web saying Apple created this so it would run efficiently on an SSD, and that may have been true to start with, but any version of macOS that came after 2014 used this, so I might as well get with the program.

The only problem was I decided to select the option where the entire drive would be scrubbed with binary zeroes, with a total of seven passes. I chose poorly. After waiting nearly four hours, the first pass had barely started. I killed the Disk Utility process, then proceeded to reboot my Mac because the act of killing Disk Utility made working with the Seagate null and void. Once the Mac was rebooted, I restarted the Disk Utility and allowed it to sanely format the drive, which it promptly performed in less than a minute.

So now the Seagate’s attached and Time Machine has performed it’s first full backup of this Mac; about 140 GiB in about 20 minutes. That Mac backup includes my iPhone backup to the Mac, so now I’m (I hope, fingers crossed) doubly backed up.

By the way, the name of the backup drive is named BACKUP6T (for terabyte). I don’t expect anything terrible to happen with this older backup drive. You can still purchase them with capacities up to 14 TiB. I also need to read one more time what the two USB A ports are used for. According to the flashy documentation I can use those front ports to backup “your files, precious photos and videos while connecting to and recharging your tablet, smartphone or camera.” I can certainly appreciate backing up my iPhone, but since I’ve never done that kind of backup before it will be another adventure!

Links

Seagate Backup Plus Hub Drive — https://www.seagate.com/products/external-hard-drives/backup-plus-hub/

be careful when updating circuitpython on old adafruit devices

whbeebe
Latest Adafruit Circuit Playground Bluefruit

It’s been a long strange trip to this post, across many years and many little personal projects. Let’s start here to de-tangle some of it.

Back in the late 2010s (2018 or so) I started purchasing Adafruit boards which included Circuit Playground as well as several Feather boards. They all came preloaded with CircuitPython, Adafruit’s fork of MicroPython. The boards were easy to program with embedded Python and the tools, while simple, were solid. What I appreciated most (and still do) is how the boards, when plugged into a host computer via USB, appear as a drive on the host system. You can then edit CircuitPython code directly on the device, and if it’s running when you save a new version, the device will note the file system change and restart with the version of your code you just saved. You can use any editor on the host system you desire and are already familiar with. The only other tool needed on the host system for development is a serial application that can work with the Adafruit device’s USB serial port. With that application you have a full Python REPL to work with, and when the application is running, you can see any printed outputs or see when and where you have a CircuitPython coding error.

The last time I worked with those boards was back in 2019, before I retired and before the Pandemic and Lockdown took hold. They went into my gadget storage and stayed there until earlier this week. I was looking for another device that had Bluetooth capabilities, so of course when I unearthed the Bluefruit in my stash I pulled it out and plugged it in. It started up just fine, except the Bluetooth code section I’d written did nothing. I opened the boot_out.txt file on the device’s flash device and read it was still running with CircuitPython 7.2. The current CircuitPython release is 8.2.9, a rather wide difference between versions. So I decided I’d stop and upgrade the device’s CircuitPython.

Circuit Playground Bluefruit Circuit Python page

When you arrive at the CircuitPython download page ( https://circuitpython.org/board/circuitplayground_bluefruit/ ) for the Bluefruit you’re presented with a very clear warning about the device’s bootloader. Since I knew without looking that my copy of Bluefruit would need a bootloader update, I scrolled down to the part at the very bottom that spoke of how to update the bootloader.

CircuitPython Bootloader Update Instructoins

At this section things begin to get a little murky. There’s a cautionary note to start off about how to find out what bootloader version you have and not to update unless you have to (I knew I had to) and then two links off the page, one to generic instructions and a big button to browse the bootloader repo. I’ll cut to the chase.

Follow this link and the resulting instructions: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-adafruit-nrf52840-feather/update-bootloader-use-command-line#

Long story short, after several failed attempts following directions before the command line instructions, I managed to update the bootloader and then update my Bluefruit to CircuitPython 8.2.9. I did all of this under Linux Mint, and it went swimmingly. When it powered back up the Bluetooth section failed to run with a coding error, so I disabled the one call to that module with a single comment and let the rest of it execute. I’ve now got two boards I need to investigate Bluetooth functionality. But, hey, it’s just a hobby, right?