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Mac 101: How to retire a Mac with an iCloud account
When you want to retire, sell or give away a Mac, you should never just pass it on to someone else as-is. There are many apps that only allow you to use your serial numbers a limited time, most notably from Adobe and Microsoft. You should deactivate the software so that you can reuse your serial numbers on a new Mac. There's other data you should save and remove also. In his article "iCloud services can make decommissioning your Mac more complicated," our good friend David Morgenstern at The Apple Core on ZDNet alerts us to an update to an Apple support article that deals with just that issue. The first critical issue, as noted on The Apple Core, is to not manually delete any of your data while signed into your iCloud account. Your iCloud account stores your files that sync with all of your devices and removing anything while signed in means your other devices will also have that information wiped. The safe steps to take are: Open iTunes and deauthorize the Mac from your iTunes account. Next, Apple recommends you back up your data. The Mac Basics: Time Machine support article, covers how to backup your Mac. You can also use other backup software, such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. Both programs are used religiously by TUAW staff members. No matter what you use, the point is to make sure you have a copy of all of the data on your computer, so that you experience no surprises when you add a new Macintosh into your hardware mix. Open iCloud from your System Preferences. Uncheck the Find My Mac preference (the last one in the list), and then click the sign out button on the left side of the iCloud preference window. Your system automatically removes all of your iCloud data at this point. If you've backed up your data though, you still have it all neatly stored away on your backup drive. The balance of the information on Apple's support article covers reformatting your hard drive and how to return it to its original "out-of-the-box" state. This is especially useful for the recipient of your old and their new Mac. I recently had a relatively new iMac go belly-up on me and can say that having a current backup is the only thing that saved me from weeks of frustration trying to resurrect files. For my iTunes account, I just had to deauthorize all my machines and reauthorize them one by one. If I had not activated my iCloud account, I would have lost all my contacts, calendars and years of carefully organized Safari bookmarks. In addition, I found that Microsoft's phone support and Adobe's chat support were most helpful in returning my lost activations for their software. TUAW Stories Related to Backing Up Your Data Getting ready for Mountain Lion: Backups World Backup Day 2013: Don't be an April Fool!
Carbon Copy Cloner goes commercial, offers previous donators free codes
With the launch of OS X Mountain Lion, Carbon Copy Cloner has made the transition from donationware to commercial product. The cloning software that makes a bootable backup of your hard drive will be $29.96 until August 12, then the price rises to $39.95. A free 30-day trial is available. To express appreciation for users who donated to Carbon Copy Cloner through July 24, Bombich Software will provide free registration codes for Carbon Copy Cloner 3.5. Qualifying users can retrieve their codes through Bombich's site. Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.6 and below will still be free. However, to use CCC on Mountain Lion, users will have to make the transition to 3.5 and the commercial product. Hat tip to YodaMac
Getting ready for Mountain Lion: Backups
Although most Mac OS X upgrades go smoothly, there's always a chance that something can go wrong. Hundreds of thousands of files are changed during an upgrade, so there's a possibility that one or more of those changes can cause your Mac to decide to not boot up properly. Without a backup, your data might be gone forever. Before you purchase Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store in July and begin the process of upgrading, make sure you back up your Mac! To begin with, you'll need an external disk drive that is at least twice the capacity of the drive that's built into your Mac. USB drives are surprisingly affordable; a glance at Amazon.com today showed a number of 2 TB drives for US$120 or less. Backups don't have to be difficult, thanks to Apple's Time Machine utility. Just plug your external drive into your Mac and OS X will ask if you wish to use that drive for Time Machine backups. Answer in the affirmative, and backups begin immediately. I'm personally a fan of bootable backups, meaning that if the primary hard drive in your Mac fails, you can boot right off of the backup copy. To create these backups, I use SuperDuper! ($27.95). Every night, the app performs some file maintenance, then adds changed or new files to a full backup (SuperDuper! includes a scheduling tool for setting up backups at regular intervals). To make sure that the backup is indeed bootable, I test it once a month. Another amazing app for bootable backups is Carbon Copy Cloner (Free, but $20 recommended). To test your bootable backup, go to System Preferences and click on "Startup Disk". Click on the backup drive icon to select it, and then click the Restart button. If all is well, your Mac should boot from the backup drive. Daily backups should be part of your Mac OS X routine already, but if they aren't, then the move to Mountain Lion should provide your impetus to start backing up now. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and Erica Sadun wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
TUAW Best of 2011: Vote for the best Mac utility app
The nominations are in, and the poll is ready to go! The TUAW Best of 2011 awards are all about you -- the readers -- and what you think is the cream of the crop of Apple or third-party products and software. To vote, select one entry from the top nominations made by readers. We'll be announcing the winner in just a few days. Vote early and often! Today TUAW is asking for your vote for the best Mac utility app of 2011. If the nominations were any indication, the free Alfred app looks like it might take the top honors for this category. It attracted over half of the total nominations for best Mac utility app. The other apps that qualified for this category include the popular iStumbler, a free wireless discovery app for Mac; perennial favorite Quicksilver; the beautiful and functional DaisyDisk (US$9.99); and shareware favorite Carbon Copy Cloner. Only one of these items will win TUAW's top honor for Mac utility app of 2011. Naming the winner is all up to you. %Poll-71784%
Ask TUAW Video Edition: Cloning Data
Douglas asks how to upgrade his hard drive and clone his Mac and Bootcamp data to the new one. We discuss new hard drives, enclosures, and cloning processes. Some resources for everyone: Carbon Copy Clone - More Info SuperDuper - More Info WinClone - Download Norton Ghost - More Info OWC - HD/Enclosure Upgrades Any questions, please leave them in the comments or email us! Read on for the video.
Mac 101: Backup basics with Time Machine and more
Did you get a new Mac for Christmas? Before you go too far in loading your Mac with software and files, make sure that you have a backup strategy. As a certified Mac consultant, I can tell you that there are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data through error, hardware failure, or accident, and those who are going to lose data in the future. Most of the bloggers at TUAW are backup fanatics, and many of us have multiple backups using Time Machine (the backup app built into Mac OS X), cloning applications like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!, and online backup services like Carbonite, Mozy, and BackBlaze. In this edition of Mac 101, I'll take you through the basics of setting up your Time Machine backup to a local hard drive, explain the power of cloning apps, and tell you why off-site backups are a good idea.
My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach
I bought a one terabyte Time Capsule shortly after it hit the market, along with an external 1.5TB drive. I use the Time Capsule's internal drive to back up two smaller capacity Macs, while the external disk backs up my two larger capacity Macs. Working with Time Machine in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the Time Capsule updates its backups every hour. This makes perfect sense if you're just dealing with one Mac wired into the Time Capsule, since it really doesn't slow anything down. But if you are using it to wirelessly back up multiple Macs, hourly backups slow everything down to a crawl. TimeMachineEditor (a free utility that I highly recommend), allows you to set Time Machine to back up as frequently or infrequently as you like. I created a setup where, with staggered backups starting between 2am and 4am, each Mac gets backed up once a day. Outside of some errant sparse image problems that required a reformat, all was well. I had long beaten the 18 month Time Capsule funerals that were recently reported... but then things turned ugly.
Time Machine plus a clone secure the day
Time Machine isn't a new feature of OS X. It was first announced as part of Leopard, not Snow Leopard, and it even had its own Get A Mac commercial. I mention it because I just recently started using it, and today was the first day that it really came in handy. I haven't been using it because I never had a spare drive to use. Instead I had one which I used for a nightly "clone" of my entire hard drive using SuperDuper! (others use CarbonCopyCloner). When I recently saw a good deal on a 2TB drive, I decided to start using Time Machine with it. Time Machine keeps more extensive backups. Apple describes Time Machine as "hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month" whereas SuperDuper takes a snapshot at a particular time, in my case, 6 a.m. every day. My most important and most frequently changed files are stored in Dropbox which gives me at least a partial "off-site" backups. Dropbox saves every file change for the past 30 days, whereas Time Machine runs once an hour. Time Machine also makes it easier to recover information from iCal or Address Book. This morning I ran the Safari 5 update on my iMac, and it didn't work. The computer seemed "hung up" and when I determined that nothing was happening, I rebooted it. (That sound you hear is the collective gasp of people who realize that rebooting after a "failed" installation can lead to Very Bad Things.) My iMac would then not let me login. I've since gotten it to work, and the point of this is not to scare you off installing Safari 5 -- this could happen with any software installation. The point is this: with Time Machine plus a clone, I know that I could disconnect the clone drive to prevent it from updating for a few days to make sure that everything is working while still having backups in place via Time Machine. If the iMac had failed to boot entirely, I could have used the SuperDuper clone to boot and restore, sometime Time Machine cannot do on its own. The moral of the story is one you've heard time and time again: backups, backups, backups. Are you using them? Have you tested them lately to make sure they'd work if you needed them?
Ask TUAW: Clocks, screen guards, MacBook hard drive replacement, NFS automount, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about replacing a MacBook hard drive, refreshing a NFS mount, getting a simple clock on screen, improving iCal's note handling, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
Ask TUAW: recovering deleted files, encrypted backups, cheap scanning, and more
Welcome back to a new year of Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about cheap scanners, encrypting backups, recovering deleted files, troubleshooting new hardware, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
Ask TUAW: Auto-tagging music, iPhone VoIP apps, replacing a hard drive and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about VOIP apps on the iPhone, auto-tagging music, Boot Camp, replacing a hard drive and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.
Backups save the day after data loss
About 13GB of data was accidentally deleted from my account on my Mac yesterday. Fortunately, due to an aggressive backup system, I was able to recover all of the files. I was trying to test out a tip sent to the TUAW team, which led me to log into (and out of) the "Guest" account several times. One of the logins seemed to hang, which triggered a memory about a data loss bug in Snow Leopard which I had read about (and which Apple is now acknowledging in "extremely rare" cases, per Cnet). I immediately reached around the back of my iMac and shut it down. At first I thought everything was OK, but then Dropbox started asking me to configure settings, as if it was the first time the app was run. Fortunately, due to the new "LAN sync" feature in recent Dropbox betas, the iMac copied my Dropbox files from my MacBook Pro on the same network in a matter of seconds, rather than having to download almost 2GB of data from Dropbox's servers. I thought that was the end of the problems, until I saw that my Terminal customizations were missing. Then I noticed that a few other applications were not functioning correctly. Suddenly I realized that I had most likely suffered more data loss than was immediately obvious. Read on to see what had to be done to recover after the data loss occurred.
Getting Ready for Snow Leopard: Installation Options, Backups, and What To Buy
We're mere hours away from Snow Leopard's arrival tomorrow. As an upgrade for Leopard users, there have been many questions about how it can be installed. How will Apple enforce this "Leopard users only" requirement? Will they ask you to insert your Leopard DVD, or just check for a Leopard installation on your current hard drive? [There's a hint from Walt Mossberg that this Leopard requirement may be a little bit lax.] Users who have installed beta versions report that they have been able to do an "Erase and Install" of Snow Leopard, meaning that you can erase your old installation of Mac OS X if you wish to start "fresh" with Snow Leopard. The biggest question is this: what happens in, say, six months, when you decide that you'd like to reinstall Snow Leopard, or install it onto a newly formatted drive? Will you have to install Leopard and then install Snow Leopard over it? We certainly hope not, and have heard some reports that suggest you won't have to do this, but nothing will be official until we can test Snow Leopard for ourselves. What are your installation options? The cheapest is obviously the $29.00 upgrade version, but there's also the $49 "Family Pack" for the multi-Mac homes. There is also the Mac Box Set which was recently introduced. If you want to upgrade from Tiger <del>(or earlier)</del> to Snow Leopard, this is your "official" upgrade path. For $169 you get 10.6, iLife '09, and iWork '09. This is also the best option if you want to absolutely guarantee that you can install Snow Leopard on a new drive without Leopard already installed. Several users I spoke with this week indicated they either have othered the Mac Box Set or plan to do so to make sure they have a "full install" Snow Leopard DVD. It's a great deal considering the "sticker price" of each, plus it's only $40 more than what Leopard originally cost. Correction: Ryan Trevisol correctly points out in the comments that all Intel Macs shipped with Tiger, so there is no "or earlier" regarding Snow Leopard upgrading.
Ask TUAW: Return to open, messed up Mighty Mouse, PDF alternatives, Boot Camp expansion, and more
It's time once again for Ask TUAW! For this round we take questions about cleaning a malfunctioning Mighty Mouse, opening files and applications with the return key, expanding a Boot Camp partition, finding alternatives to Adobe Acrobat, caring for your notebook battery, and more As always, your suggestions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1
I'm a big fan of SuperDuper! myself, but Carbon Copy Cloner has also long been a great, low cost option for cloning hard disks in OS X (indeed it's been around longer). Mike Bombich has now released version 3.1 of CCC implementing rsync 3.0.0 "to provide even greater fidelity when backing up using the 'Copy selected items' backup method." Other improvements includes an updated interface and various bugfixes, etc.Carbon Copy Cloner is a free download from Bombich Software (donation requested).[via TidBITS]
Carbon Copy Cloner 3
If you aren't using Carbon Copy Cloner, then you're missing out. This gem of an app is the easiest way to clone one Mac drive to another (you can even clone bootable volumes, so you can backup your main Mac drive to a stand by drive and boot right off of it). In addition to the clone ability, Carbon Copy Cloner makes backing up a breeze, and it is easier with Carbon Copy Cloner 3.The new version of CCC brings with it better data synchronization, block level copying, and some nice UI enhancements.Carbon Copy Cloner is donation-ware, so it is fully functional but if you use it you should really considering donating some cash to help with the development of the app.
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0 Beta - Newly Built and Universal
Back in the day, Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner was one of those must-have Mac apps. It was the first solution for making bootable backups to an external hard drive. Unfortunately, CCC had not been updated in quite some time (2003) and its former place has been taken on many Macs by the excellent SuperDuper! (which I use myself, but which runs $27.95). Mike has finally come out with an update for CCC, and has released a beta of version 3 of CCC. According to Mike, CCC3 was "completely rebuilt from the ground up to bring a new suite of features." Among these new features, are a revamped interface, network backups, "advanced scheduling capabilities" and more. Perhaps best of all, however, is that CCC3 is now a Universal application.Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0b4 is a free download, but Mike asks for donations. It looks like CCC3 could be a great, less expensive alternative to SuperDuper! once more.[Via theappleblog]
Tiger and Carbon Copy Cloner
For those of you, who, as I do, know the joy of backing up your digital life with Carbon Copy Cloner, I've spotted some news that bears some consideration before upgrading to Tiger. In this discussion thread, Mike Bombich, the creator of Carbon Copy Cloner (or CCC for short), notes: "Apple has broken all of my apps under Tiger. Its a really stupid, simple little bug that affects authentication. I'll fix my apps as soon as possible but I'm hoping Apple will fix the bug."
