Tag Archives: support

Blog

Send in the clones!

So here’s the thing that drives me crazy.

Having had a hard disk die on me a few years ago, I’m a little paranoid about backups. I have three:

  1. Time Machine, over WiFi to a Synology NAS
  2. Backblaze, “cloud” backup over the internet
  3. SuperDuper clone to an infrequently connected USB hard disk

Time Machine and Backblaze run all the time, nice, seamless and hopefully pretty complete. I do the SuperDuper clone occasionally and every few months I try to reboot and check that the clone actually works.

And that’s where the problems start.

If I forget to turn off WiFi — which I almost always do — then when the clone starts up, it immediately connects to WiFi and starts to back up to Time Machine. I panic and stop it as soon as I realise.

But then I boot back to my main disk and… Time Machine decides it needs to do a full backup. Which. Takes. Forever. (Backblaze is also doing a huge backup, presumably for the same reason.)

What’s the answer to this? Is there a way to switch off WiFi on the clone automatically? Only start when the boot disk has a specific name? I don’t know! It’s hard to search for because I can’t think what the answer might be.

Opinion

Deleting a Google Apps Domain

Imagine the scene…

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic.

Recall that I have an iPhone app called Yummy. It has, or rather had, a website called YummyApp.com. Last year I formed a company called Wandle Software and since then have been merging my various web “properties.” The website moved over to wandlesoftware.com earlier this year, email was the last thing that needed transferring.

My email is hosted using Google Apps — Gmail but without the gmail.com email address if you’ve not heard of it. What I wanted to do was move yummyapp.com from being a “proper” domain to what Google refer to as a domain alias for wandlesoftware.com.

I assumed that what I’d have to do was deactivate the old one, wait a bit and then reactivate it on the new domain.

So I looked at the Dashboard to find the “delete” option.

Nothing.

So I deactivate all the services. I delete all the users except one. And I look again. Still nothing.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I look in the documentation.

According to the Help I was basically correct. Unfortunately the delete option just wasn’t there.

I reset my cache. I switched to Firefox. And cleared the cache in Firefox, all to no avail.

The Help for Google Apps is actually pretty good. These seems to be a lot of it and, as you’d imagine, search mostly works well. But help is different from support and — long story short — there’s no way to get the latter.

Instead there’s a forum that (I think) is user supported rather than directly by Google. This is fine unless there’s a problem with the software. I asked a question and within an hour got a very helpful reply that said that I needed to raise a support ticket.

So how do you raise a support ticket when that’s a “value add” feature reserved for paying customers? (Even when there’s a fault.)

I cheated.

I took the “free thirty day trial” of Google Apps for Business. I immediately raised a support ticket and only a couple of hours later got a phone call from the US. The guy was personable, efficient and immediately solved my problem. He even offered to stay on the line long enough for me to confirm that it had worked rather than hanging up immediately to improve call times (as many call centres do).

Of course I appreciate why Google can’t provide phone support to all and sundry, but surely there has to be a better of helping customer who find flaws in the software?

Links

My delicious.com bookmarks for March 26th through March 31st

  • ‘Useless’ Is A Loaded Word – "In almost any life situation where you need to get something out of another person, being a dick is never the right method to go about it. Using loaded words like ‘useless’ or ‘worthless’ is being a dick. We will listen to your feedback and thank you for it, but unless it is some urgent issue that will affect every user, it’s most likely getting shoved to the bottom of the pile in favor of doing things to make the friendly customers happy."
  • Don’t blame inflation for all the price rises – Summary: food and gadgets are cheaper, entertainment is considerably more expensive.
  • We should stop running away from radiation – "A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information."