Browse Storage & Backup Help and Tips

Browse Storage & Backup Help and Tips

Five reasons to partition a disk
Apple's Disk Utility makes it easy to split a hard drive up into multiple parts called partitions. But why would you ever bother? Joe Kissell shows you five things partitioning a disk allows you to do.
Six ways to botch your backups
Shocked that a company as prominent as Danger, Inc. could lose T-Mobile's Sidekick customers' data? Protect your business backups by avoiding these six mistakes.
Shifting large media libraries
It happens to lots of us: Large media files choke our startup drive. Here are solutions for sharing the wealth between an internal and external hard drive.
Restore your old pictures with iPhoto
Return your scanned old photos to their former glory with a few easy adjustments in iPhoto.
Four smart tips for managing scanned photos
Bring order and security to your scanned printed media with these smart iPhoto management and back up strategies
Identify causes of large Time Machine backups
Learn about possible sources of large Time Machine backups, and tools you can use to identify those sources.
Back up iPhoto's Faces database
If you use iPhoto's face-recognition tool, don't lose all of your hard work with one stroke of bad luck. Back up your Faces data to protect against data corruption or user error.
The no-worry backup plan
Backing up data isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition—what works for you will depend on the types of data you want to protect and, more important, how worried you are about keeping that data safe. Rob Griffiths' guidelines can help you figure out your own plan.
Change color of BBEdit and TextWrangler 'invisibles' characters
Learn how to change the color of the special characters that BBEdit and TextWrangler use to display invisible characters, such as tabs and line breaks.
Bugs & Fixes: Winning the clone wars
Making a clone backup of your startup drive is a good ideal, but it can lead to hassles if some software on your drive is unable to figure out that the startup drive and its clone are two different volumes. Ted Landau works his way through one such hassle.
Formatting a flash drive
You've got a fistful of USB flash drives that you'd like to reformat and use for your own purposes. Here's how.
Common cures for a slowzy Mozy
Mozy seems to have forgotten that it's already backed up my data. A Twitter gripe brings helpful advice.
Bugs & Fixes: APC battery backups and Intel Macs with Leopard
If you own an Intel-based Mac running a recent version of Mac OS X 10.5, battery backups from American Power Conversion could give you grief. Ted Landau has the details.
Setting up an AirPort disk
You have an AirPort Extreme Base Station and a USB hard drive. Now what?
Turn your iPod or iPhone into a portable drive
Whether you use your iPod or iPhone for entertainment, communication, or to amplify your cool quotient, all models share one thing in common: they can function as portable storage devices.
Buying advice: Network-attached storage
Network-attached storage (NAS) makes it easy to add file servers to your network.
Macworld Buying Guides: Optical drives
If you have a Mac with a Combo drive (CD burner that can read but not write to DVD) or a single-layer DVD burner, buying an external optical drive is an affordable and attractive upgrade.
Macworld Buying Guides: Desktop RAID
If you have heavy-duty storage needs, a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is the most cost-effective, mind-easing solution.
Buying advice: Internal Hard Drives
With a little bit of handiwork, you can upgrade the hard drive that came with your Mac. Here's what to look for when buying a new internal hard drive.
Macworld Buying Guides: External desktop hard drives
If you’re looking for a quick and painless way to add massive amounts of storage for your music, photos, videos, or system backups, an external hard drive is hard to beat.
Bugs & Fixes: Bugs affect TiVo-to-iPhone transfers
Ted Landau wonders if he can convert TiVo files into an iPhone format. He can, but not without a good deal of time and hassle.
Look before leaping... and formatting hard drives
Rob Griffiths learns—the hard way—the importance of double-checking one’s plans before implementing them, especially when it comes to hard drives.
Bugs & Fixes: Dealing with Data Backup problems
Ted Landau uses Prosoft’s Data Backup to protect himself from data loss. But lately, he’s run into a problem with running the backup program on his MacBook Pro that has both him and the developer stumped.
Connect: How to add network attached storage
If you need to back up multiple Macs or share media files on your home (or small-business) network, you might need more than a USB drive attached to your AirPort base station or Time Capsule. Kirk McElhearn explains why network attached storage might be a better solution.
Bugs & Fixes: Vanishing contacts and calendar events
Ted Landau tells you what to do if contacts and calendar events synced via MobileMe suddenly disappear from your iPhone. And he returns to smart flash drives, the subject of last week’s column.
Bugs & Fixes: The trouble with USB ‘smart’ flash drives
Ted Landau discovers that the new generation of U3 smart drives can cause a lot of headaches for Mac users.
In case of emergency
In a summer full of natural disasters how prepared are you (and your Mac) for unanticipated emergencies?
Bugs & Fixes: Time Machine holdups
Ted Landau’s Time Machine backups began sticking at the “Preparing…” stage of starting a backup. So he did some digging to find out what was causing the problem.
Time Machine tips and troubleshooting
Some people will be able to set up and turn on Time Machine with a single click. But you may need to do some manual configuration to get it to work the way you want. You should also be aware of some quirks in Time Machine’s operation, particularly when restoring data.
Is Time Machine all you need?
Although any backup is better than no backup at all, Time Machine may not protect your data to the extent or in the way that you need. A few significant weaknesses offset its impressive strengths.