Friday, January 6, 2012

Best way to use iDisk as working folder?

I want to have all my important and current files on iDisk (at least for now, since I'm already paying for it), so I can access them from various devices. However using iDisk directly on my Mac is very slow, especially in file dialogs. So my idea is to use the standard 'Documents' folder, and keep this (or better, parts of it) in sync with the local copy of iDisk. I'm planning to do this via unison and/or lsyncd. If any of the 2.5 readers of this blog have any ideas on this, I would be delighted to hear them. Also I'm not sure how to make lsyncd work on OS X, there doesn't seem to be macport.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Removing non-empty buckets from Amazon S3

I had an old bucket in S3 made by Jungle Disk aeons ago (about 3 years), when it was free and using S3. It contained thousands of files, some backups I used to make, and later abandoned. So I wanted to delete the bucket, in order not to continue paying the $ 0.02 rent every month. But, alas, you can only delete empty buckets on S3. And you can only delete 7-8 files at a time using Amazon's web interface. So I started looking around (i.e. googling), and came across s3cmd. Very nice and simple to use, and installable via macports, too. It has a recursive delete option, exactly what I needed. Let it run for about an hour (yes, many files to delete), and voila: the bucket was empty, and easily removable.
Optional listen while waiting: "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It".