Apple Mac and Lost programs

Hi All,

The hard drive on my windows based Laptop recently failed, no problem as I back up to Dropbox in the cloud, but recently realised my C-bus programs were in the Clipsal Folder on the hard drive :-(
Two questions;
*Ive upgraded to an Apple Mac laptop (still learning the differences, like wheres the delete key!), what is the best way to allow me to use and access Toolkit and Piced and other tools like the network scanner on the Mac?
*once I get the above working, can I download the programs from the equipment on the sites Ive worked on or will the groups etc be meaningless?

TIA, Aaron

 

Hi Aaron,

I need to start by saying I am not really an Apple guy (apart from all this Apple stuff I now seem to own!! ).

You said that you had backed up your stuff to Dropbox. Hopefully this included the Clipsal directory or at worst the site's project 'tag' files which are in the C-Gate/C-Gate2 directory (or whatever C-Gate directory name you used) in the TAG sub-directory and are .xml files starting with the project's name eg BartSt.xml. If you don't have these you will need to recreate the group address tag names for the numeric group addresses. You can still access and program the site with a clean Toolkit but all you will see is the group address numbers, not the old project tags such as 'Lounge DL','Outside Light' etc. Everytime you edit the network with Toolkit it backs up the project file in a .old version of the xml file, so if you are using a hard drive recovery prog etc, search for both .xml and .old files to see if it can find them.

Another possible place to look for the Project xml files is in the 'Project' directories under either PICED, or HomeGate/SchedulePlus directories (for the onsite touch screens) as you will usually find the project .xml tag files in there as well.

All the best,

Brad

 

Hey Aaron,

Currently CIS programs such as PICED and Toolkit are windows programs only and don't come in Mac binaries. So you are going to have to bootcamp or as I do use a Virtual Machine with Windows installed.

I use VMware and am very happy with it, but there are others who swear by Parallels.

As for your databases, what bmerrick said.
However if you did archive any of your PICED projects to give to the client ect. you should be able to get a database from them too. The other thing to try is pulling a project down from a CTC Screen, some one will correct me if I am wrong but I believe you can get a database out of them if you try hard enough.

Jono

 

Thanks Brad and Jono,

unfortunately, I didn't back up the old files , but Im trying to recover some stuff from the hard drive, and I now know what to look for .
Sounds like Im also going to need to keep a windows machine for this sort of work - just need to convince SWMBO!

Thanks again both

 

Parallels

Hi Aaron,
I have used macs for cbus for over 10 years now and haven't had any issues. I used to use virtual PC back when it was free (was it ever free?) but now use parallels & windows 7 for cbus & alarm programming with the USB/serial adapter. I find that backing up my cbus projects to a folder on the desktop is a good way keep them safe as the folder is accessible from the mac desktop (for when windows crashes...not if), the pc desktop, Dropbox and it is also backed up in time machine.
Once you are used to a mac it is hard to go back to PCs. They are far superior machines and i find they are usually talked badly about by people who haven't owned or used one. I'm on about my third PowerBook and they take a beating on the job sites.