

iMac:~ dave$ cat disk_usage_log.shĭf -ml | grep "$1" | cut -wf3 > $LOG_FILE You pass in the name of the volume, and it stamps the disk usage in MB every 5m along with a timestamp. So I spent a couple minutes trying to find some free app to plot disk usage over time, but nothing was immediately forthcoming (ideas?). I noticed this morning that, while logged in as me all night, her Photos appeared to still be syncing, which means it must have been proceeding very slowly overnight because I don’t think there was THAT much to sync. I still might do this, at least for now, in the absence of something better, and given that iCloud will probably not lose their data. And since I sometimes don’t even realize the Mac has been rebooted, it could go for a while before I notice, exposing them to data loss. Any time I have a power outage or (more often) Mac crash or reboot due to an upgrade, my other family members I set up to backup this way will have to be logged back in, or their backups will get stale. That means this is not a convenient unattended backup solution. So, after a reboot, logging in as me, all her syncing stopped. Since it’s writing to an external drive and still trying to catch up with photos in the Cloud, it’s actually pretty easy to see when it’s actively syncing for stalled: I watch the file size of the photo library on the external drive which I can obviously see even from my own login.Īnd my results so far match it stays busy syncing even when she’s not the active “GUI” user, but only if she’s “logged in”. Found a spare 3TB external drive in my “goodie cabinet” to use for this purpose, moved the Photo Library configured under my daughter’s login to this external drive, made sure it was enabled for iCloud (and Download Originals), and let it begin to sync.
