All about keeping your data safe and in more than one place.
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
If you use Time Machine to backup your Mac to an external hard drive, here are some basics that you can check if backups are no longer occurring.
Read moreBacking up your iPhone or iPad is important because it permits you to recover all of your applications, personal data including photos stored on the device. It also allows you to recover text messages and call history on the iPhone. Apple provides two ways to backup your iPhone or iPad and I typically recommend using both methods.
Read moreYour Mac may be storing extra iPhone and iPad backups. If so, they are wasting hard drive storage space. Here are instructions on how you can easily view a list of all iPad and iPhone backups and remove the extras.
Read moreThis week’s Tech Tip is a cautionary tale. Backups Don’t Exist Unless You Test Them. This adage may not make immediate sense to you, but let me explain. It is extremely important to test your backups by actually restoring one or more files. If you don’t know that you can successfully restore a file from … Read more