All about keeping your data safe and in more than one place.
Do you want to make sure that Time Machine backs up an external hard drive, USB flash drive or an SD card that is connected to your Mac? If so, here are instructions to make sure this happens. Click on the Apple menu and select System Preferences Click on Time Machine Click on the Options … Read more
When you buy a new Mac you likely want to transfer all of your data and applications from your current Mac to a new Mac. Here are instructions on how to accomplish this migration using a current Time Machine backup of your current Mac. I’m going to provide instructions for two different scenarios. If you’re … Read more
Do you need to retrieve data from a sick or dead hard drive? If you do not have a backup of the data on this disk, then you should consider hiring a professional data recovery company like DriveSavers. DriveSavers has been an industry leader for 30 years. They have a stellar reputation and success rate. In … Read more
Do you need to reconfigure Time Machine to use a new external hard drive? If you read my Tech Tips regularly then you’ll recall that I strongly recommend that everybody setup automatic and redundant systems to backup his or her Mac. If you use Time Machine to backup your Mac to an external hard drive then … Read more
Does Time Machine continually display a status message of Preparing Backup and, thus, it fails to ever complete its current backup of your Mac? If so, you might need to delete the InProgress backup file. These InProgress backup files are created as part of Time Machine performing a backup. However, if the backup fails or gets … Read more
Do your friends send you a lot of photos and videos as attachments to text messages? If so, these photos and videos could be consuming a fair amount of space on your iPhone or iPad. I recommend that you periodically review these images, save the ones that you want and then delete them. Here are instructions on … Read more
At some point, everyone will experience a hard drive failure. When this happens, a Time Machine backup can save your data. Here are instructions on how to restore all applications and personal files from a Time Machine backup onto a new hard drive. Time Machine is a backup application made by Apple. It comes bundled with … Read more
CrashPlan is a backup application, made by Code42. I use it and recommend it to create off-site, cloud-based, backups. To backup to Code42’s servers, one needs a subscription. Code42 used to offer both home and business plans, but they stopped selling home plans in August 2017. A Business subscription costs $10 per computer per month and provides unlimited … Read more
Clients often ask me how often they should backup their Mac. They also ask me which files they should backup. My answer is short and sweet. Everybody should backup all files on their Mac’s hard drive every day. Why? Because you never knows when disaster will strike and you’ll need to rely on a recent backup to … Read more
This week’s Tech Tip is a cautionary tale. Using Dropbox as your sole backup can be dangerous. I recently became aware of an incident that occurred in the summer of 2014. A user of the free version of Dropbox lost about 8000 files related to his PhD dissertation due to a bug in Dropbox’ Selective … Read more