Now that you’ve been using Time Machine regularly to back up your computer, you should be fully prepared if your Mac crashes or if you need to move data from one Mac to another. Restoring data from Time Machine is just as easy as backing things up in the first place.

Restore a single file or folder

If you’re looking for a certain file or folder, start by connecting the external drive that you use for Time Machine backups or by making sure that you can connect to your Time Capsule. Click the Time Machine item in the menu bar at the top of your screen (it looks like a clock with an arrow running counterclockwise around it), and choose Enter Time Machine. Here, all of your saved backups will appear in chronological order. Use the visual timeline on the right side to scroll through your backups and look for specific items or folders. Older dates are indicated in pink on the timeline; the most up-to-date data on your Mac is indicated in white. (You’ll see the word 'Now' in bold, white letters on the timeline.)

Not sure which backup might hold the last copy of your missing file? Try running a Spotlight search in Time Machine based on keywords. You’ll see a search field in the upper right corner of each Finder window in the Time Machine view. Type in the file name or keywords from the file, and Spotlight will search through your backups to find the latest copy.

Once you think that you’ve found what you’re looking for, use OS X’s Quick Look to make sure: Select the file and then press the spacebar to view the file without having to launch its parent application.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It began innocently enough. I helped a friend set up a Skype account and phone number. All seemed to go well—until we tested out the phone number. I dialed the number from my landline phone and kept getting a busy signal. I couldn’t even leave a voicemail message.

Trying to figure out the ultimate cause of this frustrating symptom led us down a dark tunnel that, at times, seemed to have no light at the end. If you can guess the final answer before I reveal it, you’ve earned a Bugs & Fixes gold star.

The proximate cause of the busy signal was easy to locate. We navigated to the Privacy section of Skype’s Preferences. The options to “Allow calls from” and “Receive calls to my Skype Number from” were set to “Contacts” rather than “Anyone.” This meant that anyone not in my friend’s Skype Contacts list (which was empty at the time) could not call her. Apparently, when such calls are blocked, the caller gets a busy signal.

I would have appreciated if Skype provided more feedback when a call was blocked, but at least we now knew what needed to be done. Or so we thought.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mountain Lion includes a systemwide Dictation feature. But until you learn some tricks for better transcriptions, you can’t harness the true power of telling your Mac what to type.

Download Macworld Video #198

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

[Ask the iTunes Guy is a regular column in which we answer your questions on everything iTunes related. If there’s something you’d like to know, send an email to the iTunes Guy for consideration.]

We get a lot of questions about manipulating files, and this week I’ve chosen a number of them to address. I look at how to join music tracks, how to add album art to tracks, and how to delete tracks from an iPhone. I also look at a persistent download problem that a lot of people have encountered in recent weeks with purchased or matched music.

Q: Is there any way to combine two songs in iTunes? I want to connect two together so that one flows into the other, with no gap, even if I shuffle the playlist. Can this be done easily?

It’s quite easy to do if you rip the songs from a CD. Before ripping, select the two (or more) tracks you want to join on the CD, then choose Advanced -> Join CD Tracks. iTunes will then show that the tracks are set to be joined. Rip the CD, and those joined tracks will make a single file.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Craig Moyer longs for a Finder feature he could once invoke via clever hack. He writes:

I’d like the Size column to always appear before Date Modified in Finder windows displayed in List view. Many years ago I was able to modify the com.apple.finder.plist file to do this, but that’s no longer an option as that file has changed. Is there still a workaround?

While this may elicit one or two “Well, duh!” responses from the less sensitive members of our forums, this is something I haven’t bothered to think about in… well, ever. And so this came as a surprise as much to me as it may to you.

In Mountain Lion, open a new Finder window that contains the contents of the root directory—so, Applications, Library, System, etc. Press Command-J to open the View window. In the Finder window drag the Size column to the left so that it appears before Date Modified. Now in the View window click the Use as Defaults button and close the View window.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It's annoying that there's no easy way to create new reminders in Mountain Lion without launching the Reminders app itself. But an anonymous Hints reader did figure out a way to do so with Automator. The only hitches: All reminders you create with this workflow must go to the same list, with the same priority, and you can't automatically assign a due date.

Open Automator and opt to create a new service. At the top of the Automator scripting pane, choose No Input from the Service Receives drop-down and Any Application as the In option. Next, open the the Text actions library, choose Ask for Text and drag it to the right-hand part of the Automator window. Enter a prompt, such as Enter a Reminder. From the Mail library, choose New Reminders Item and drag that below Ask for Text. Choose a list to which you want to add the item. You can select a priority, but you probably don't want to select a Due Date. That done, save the service.

Now open the Keyboard preference pane in System Preferences, open the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and find the Services section on the left. Select the service you just created and assign a shortcut to it. Now, you can hit that keyboard combo from any Mac app, and you should get a dialog box prompting you to enter a reminder.

I recently stumbled over two Safari-related problems. In each case, specific features of a website did not work as expected. While my precise symptoms may be limited in scope, the overall problems are general ones and the solutions apply to a wide variety of similar situations.

Extension prevents Flash video from running

One of my guilty pleasures is the NBC series Smash. I’m especially a fan of the show’s music. That’s why I was glad to discover that NBC offers video clips showcasing the musical numbers from the series.

Unfortunately, when I attempted to view any of the Smash clips, I got nowhere. The rotating circle that indicates a video is loading just kept rotating, apparently intending to do so forever. No error message appeared. But neither did the video.

As a first diagnostic step, I shifted from Safari to Firefox. The videos played just fine in Firefox. This suggested that the problem was more likely with my installation of Safari than with the NBC website. Returning to Safari, I next checked what extensions I was running. As the videos were Flash-based, I first turned my attention to ClickToFlash.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Savvy Preview users know they can do some interesting things to PDFs—convert them to black-and-white or sepia tone, increase or decrease their lightness, and more—by selecting File -> Export, then selecting one of the Quartz filters in the resulting dialog box. Reader zpjet is one of those users, but he was never satisfied with results of the Reduce File Size filter (which he'd use when trying to make PDFs small enough to send by e-mail): It made them too small and made the graphics fuzzy.

After a little digging around, he found that these filters are located in the folder /System/Library/Filters, and that they're XML files that are easily edited with TextEdit (or any other text editor). Examining the file for the Reduce File Size filter, he found out why it didn't work for him: Two of the parameters—Compression Quality and ImageSizeMax—were just too low (0.0 and 512, respectively).

So he copied this file to his Desktop, made two copies of it, and then renamed all three: Reduce File Size Good, Reduce File Size Better, and Reduce File Size Best. Then he changed the parameters of each file: 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75 for Compression Quality (respectively) and 842, 1684, and 3508 for ImageSizeMax (ditto). (The first is A4-size at 72dpi, the second A4 at 144dpi, and the third A4 at 300dpi).

Finally, he changed the default string for the Name key at the end of each file—which is what displays in the Export menu—to match its file name. He then created a /Library/Filters folder and put all three edited files in it.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Following in the footsteps of Google and other services, Dropbox this weekend enabled two-factor authentication to bring enhanced security to its users.

While Dropbox was not among the services compromised in the well-publicized attack on Wired’s Mat Honan earlier this month, the service has suffered from at least one security breach in recent months. Adding two-factor authentication is one way to make your connection to the service—which for many users is an increasingly important part of their workflow—more secure.

As with Google’s implementation, Dropbox’s two-factor authentication relies on two separate elements: something you know (a password) and something you have (in this case, a separately generated code). While the combination of these two elements doesn’t guarantee your security, it does make it much harder for a potential hacker to gain access to your account.

The setup

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Bill Carmichael has discovered something going on behind the scenes that concerns him. He writes:

I recently installed Little Snitch to help resolve some network problems I was having. When I looked at its Network Monitor window I couldn’t help but notice the many times Google Software Update, Google Software Update via ksfetch, and GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon appeared. What are these things and do I need them?

As the names imply, these are processes that automatically work in the background to keep your Google software—Picasa, Google Earth, Chrome, etc—up to date.

Unlike just about any other update mechanism I can recall, Google Software Update doesn’t ask permission to install updates when a new one becomes available. It just happens without your say so.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Like everyone else, I need to keep track of lots of bits of information. Some of those bits are as simple as the brand of salad dressing my wife likes; others are as complex as an outline for a multi-year project at work. Whatever the size, origin, and purpose of these bits, I keep track of them all by saving them in a reliable system of plain-text notes—a system that enables me to find any bit of information whenever I need it, in a form that makes sense to me when I do.

This system is based on two simple principles: All notes are saved in plain-text files, and I follow some basic but strict guidelines for creating and storing them.

What is a note?

For starters, I clearly distinguish between notes and tasks. For me, a task is something that requires action. I am an OmniFocus ( ) user, and all of my tasks are stored there.

Notes, on the other hand, contain a single idea or a concrete plan. For example, I have one plain-text note containing a list of my favorite books and another one for the books I want to read in the future. I have a note that explains how to reprogram my car stereo when my battery dies, another with the measurements of all of the rooms and furniture in our house (furniture shopping sometimes happens unexpectedly).

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Have you ever been annoyed to find that your Mac won’t go to sleep when you tell it to? Reader wjv found that, in Mac OS X 10.6 and later, there’s a simple way of finding out what’s keeping your Mac awake. To do so, run the following command in your Terminal: pmset -g assertions .

In the first section of output, you’ll see the status of two kernel assertions (essentially, assumptions the system makes about the state of your system) named PreventSystemSleep and PreventUserIdleSystemSleep. An accompanying status of 1 for either of these means that it is currently triggered. For example, here’s what I see when I run that command on my Mac mini:

Assertion status system-wide:
  PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
  PreventSystemSleep             0
  PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     1
  ExternalMedia                  1
  DisableLowPowerBatteryWarnings 0
  UserIsActive                   0
  ApplePushServiceTask           0
  BackgroundTask                 0

Below that, you’ll see something like this:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple wants you to use iCloud as the location for your saved documents. If you aren’t willing to cooperate, Apple applies some pressure to get you to change your mind.

Case in point: The Open and (especially) the Save dialogs for apps that support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion’s new Documents in the Cloud feature (also called iCloud Document Library). Apple has changed the rules here, as compared to how things worked in previous versions of OS X.

When you select to save a new Untitled document, the Save dialog opens with a folder location already selected. In OS X 10.7 Lion and all prior versions of OS X, if you’ve never changed this default location, it’s probably your Documents folder. If you do change the folder location, the app typically remembers your decision. This means the next time you attempt to save a new document, the default folder will be the location you last chose. This is what most users want and expect. So far, so good.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A new operating system means new reader tips, and we’ve been getting plenty of them for Mountain Lion. Here are two quick ones for two of the most popular OS X apps.

First, if you previously used iChat to send and receive screen shots or graphics, you may have used Quick Look to view them. More specifically, if you had the iChat File Transfers window open, you could click on an inline graphic that someone sent you in a chat and press the space bar to preview it with OS X's built-in file-viewer. In Mountain Lion’s Messages app, this no longer works. You can, however, click on the graphic right in the Messages window, then press the space bar to view the image in Quick Look.

Second, you no longer need to right-click and summon the Edit Name dialog to rename a bookmark in Safari's Bookmarks Bar. Now, in Safari 6, you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will become editable, so you can rename it then and there. This applies to Safari 6 as a whole, which is provided with Mountain Lion, but which is also available for Mac OS X 10.7.

Reader Gordon Arbuthnot has discovered an interesting chink in iCloud’s armor. He writes:

I recently printed a Mail message as a PDF file and chose iCloud as the destination. I thought it would show up in Preview’s iCloud file storage but it’s not there. Nor is it in the Pages file storage. Any idea of where it is and how I can get to it?

I do. But before we get to that, let me recount your steps for the benefit of those readers just getting out of bed.

In order to do what you’ve done, you’d have to follow these steps:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As a follow-up to last week’s column on Mountain Lion troubleshooting, here are two more OS X 10.8 bugs for your collection. Both of these critters result in crashes of the affected applications.

Network proxy bug

There’s good news and there’s bad news here. The good news is that this bug affects only a minority of users—those that enable “network proxies” (as done by going to Network System Preferences, clicking the Advanced button and selecting Proxies). The bad news is that, if the bug affects you, it’s serious: Several different third-party programs are likely to crash on launch.

The author of MarsEdit explains:

The issue is related specifically to the ‘Auto Proxy Discovery’ and ‘Automatic Proxy Configuration’ settings in Network preferences. If you have one of these options checked, you are very likely to crash in MarsEdit, Safari, Tweetbot, and any number of other apps that rely on Apple’s networking libraries.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encrypt a disk from the Finder

This new full-disk encryption feature is well hidden in Mountain Lion. Typically, you use Apple’s Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) to work with hard disks or other types of removable media. Disk Utility can erase, partition, and repair hard disks, but curiously, it cannot encrypt a hard disk.

Control-click to encrypt To encrypt a disk, instead right- or Control-click on a hard disk’s icon on the Desktop, or in a Finder window sidebar. Choose Encrypt Disk Name and enter a password. You’ll have to enter the password a second time, and you won’t be able to go any further unless you also enter a password hint. You need to choose a good, secure password, but it shouldn’t be something too complicated.

You’ll most likely use the encryption feature for a portable disk you carry around with you. When you connect the disk to your Mac, or to someone else’s Mac, you’ll need to remember the password to access the files. When you use the disk with your Mac, or, say, a Mac at work, you can store the password in the keychain.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Edward Bennett is rightfully confused by a Mountain Lion feature that isn’t what it appears to be. He writes:

I’m a long time Mac user and, when I upgraded to Lion, was dismayed to find that the Save As command had disappeared as it was something I used all the time. When the command returned with Mountain Lion I was thrilled but, from what I can tell, it doesn’t work the way it once did. Can you clear up my confusion?

Yes. Like you, I turned backflips when I saw that I could invoke the command in supported applications simply by selecting File, holding down the Option key, and choosing Save As. But that joy soon turned to gloom. For this reason:

Back in The Day, when you created a document, banged away on it for a bit, saved, banged away a bit more, and then chose Save As, you created a new document that included all the changes you’d made up to that point. The original file closed and the Saved As document remained. If you opened the original later, you’d find the content it contained up to the point where you invoked the last Save (not Save As) command.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wired writer Mat Honan fell victim to a brutal hack over the weekend. Through misplaced ingenuity and a smidgen of social engineering, hackers gained access to his iCloud account and wiped his iPhone, iPad, and Mac drives clean. The actual attack involved breaking into Honan’s Amazon account, and then using information found there to break into his iCloud account. Things only got worse from there.

Amazon and Apple clearly need to institute security policy changes to better protect their users. And Honan made mistakes of his own, most notably not backing up his Mac regularly. But the hackers’ initial entry point into Honan’s digital life was through, of all things, the “forgot password” functionality offered by Gmail. When they first plunked Honan’s email address into that form, Gmail displayed a redacted version of Honan’s MobileMe account: m••••n@me.com. Honan has plenty of “if only's” on his mind, but one biggie—to quote Honan’s story for Wired, is this: If he “had used two-factor authentication for Gmail, everything would have stopped here.”

(Note: Google calls it two-step authentication, but “two-factor authentication” is just as common a name. We’ll use them interchangeably.)

Understand two-step authentication

First, let’s clarify what two-step authentication actually means. In Google’s case, it works this way: If you enable two-factor authentication, when you next log in to your Gmail account, you’ll first proceed as you always do—by providing your username and password. But before you get to your inbox, Google will next demand a separate code.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Editor’s note: Mat Honan has posted a full account of how hackers gained access to his accounts and wiped out the data on his devices. Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris told Macworld: “Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password. In this particular case, the customer’s data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers' data is protected.”

The future is now. Our devices are interconnected, and that linking where everything can access everything is wonderful. But it turns out there’s a dark side, too: All that connectivity makes it much easier for an attacker to compromise all our data, no matter where it is. Wired’s Mathew Honan learned this the hard way over the weekend, as a hacker not only gained access to his devices, but also wiped all the data from them causing a fair bit of mayhem along the way.

As Honan reported on his blog, he was hacked hard. And the attacker didn’t use complicated algorithms to brute force his way into Honan’s accounts. Instead, the hacker reportedly called up Apple’s technical support line, pretended to be Honan, and successfully provided answers to Honan’s self-selected security questions—the very ones Apple asks of all iCloud customers, to ensure that their accounts are secure. (We contacted Apple to confirm that account of events, but the company hasn’t responded.) [Update: Honan has said via Twitter that the hacker did not provide security question answers, but rather compromised the account in a different way.]

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As you’ve probably heard, Safari 6 has a new combined URL and search field. If you type a search term into that field then press Return, you’ll get a Google page with search results. But, oddly, the URL for that Google search won’t appear in that search-address field; instead, the search term itself will remain there. This can be frustrating, because sometimes you want the URL for the Google results page, either to save or to share.

Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes recently tweeted a quick AppleScript that enables you to get that Google search URL. Many Tricks developer Peter Maurer suggested an improvement to the script, then Jordan Kay posted a final, one-line version of it. The sum of their collaboration: Run the following script and it will save the URL for the frontmost Safari tab to the clipboard; from there you can paste it wherever you want.

tell application "Safari" to set the clipboard to URL of current tab of window 1 as string

(To use the script, open AppleScript Editor, paste the above text in a new window, then save it as an application. You can then double-click that application to run it.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Good news. Based on reviews I’ve read (and my own experience), the consensus appears to be that OS X Mountain Lion is a generally stable update with a minimum of significant problems, especially for a 10.x.0 release. Still, things can and do occasionally go wrong. It always pays to be cautious before upgrading to a new version of OS X. This remains true for Apple’s latest cat.

Your first caution should be to make sure that nothing bad happens as a direct result of the install process itself. Bob LeVitus offers an excellent brief overview of what you should do before clicking the Install button. Macworld’s Dan Frakes, as usual, provides the definitive take on everything you could possibly want to know about installing Mountain Lion.

I’ll highlight one general install tip here: After downloading the Install OS X Mountain Lion app from the Mac App Store, you’ll find it in your Applications folder. Make a copy of the app before proceeding. Otherwise, the app will vanish without a trace after you complete the install (this is a deliberate feature, not a bug). Yes, you can get it back by re-downloading the app, but keeping a copy saves you time and hassle, in case you ever want to use Install again.

After you have Mountain Lion up and running, you are still not home free. Here’s a round-up of some post-install Mountain Lion problems you may encounter:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More than a few Mac users worry that OS X is becoming too much like iOS, thanks to the former gaining features obviously inspired by the latter. But even the most anti-iOS Mac user has to admit that sometimes this is a good thing. To wit: With our iPhones and iPads, we’ve come to expect that even when the device has been asleep, waking it will immediately present us with our latest email messages, events, reminders, changes to contacts, and more. These devices will even back up to iCloud and sync with iTunes when unattended. Under Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), if you’ve got a compatible Mac laptop, you’ll get many of the same benefits thanks to a new feature called Power Nap.

Which Macs are compatible? Currently only the Mid 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina Display and the Mid 2011 and Mid 2012 MacBook Air models. Each of these models requires a SMC firmware update (Mid 2011 Air, Mid 2012 Air, Mid 2012 Pro Retina) to support Power Nap.

How do I use Power Nap?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Nick Hamilton finds himself stuck between old hardware and a new operating system. He writes:

I have an older AirPort Express Base Station. I recently installed Mountain Lion and have found that its version of AirPort Utility doesn’t work with this Base Station—when I try to select the base station I’m told that I need AirPort Utility 5.6. I downloaded that version but when I attempt to install it Mountain Lion tells me it’s not supported. What do I do?

Mountain Lion is telling you an untruth. That version of AirPort Utility will run on your Mac (even under Mountain Lion) and work with your Base Station. The fly in the ointment in this case is the installer. It simply refuses to install this perfectly fine utility.

The way around is to extract the utility from the installer package. For this kind of thing I always turn to CharlesSoft’s $20 Pacifist. Pacifist lives to open .pkg package files, .dmg disk images, and .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .xar archives and extract their contents. I ran this very package through Pacifist, located the application, extracted it, and it ran like a champ on my MacBook Pro—allowing me to configure an ancient AirPort Express Base Station.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Couple of quick ones to welcome OS X Mountain Lion to Hints:

If you need a temporary break from all those alerts and banners, but you don’t want to turn off notifications altogether, Hints reader guillaumegete notes that you can pause the Notification Center with one click: Press the Option key while clicking on the Notification icon in the right end of the menu bar. This will pause the display of notifications. To reactivate them, you can either Option-click the same icon again; display notifications at the right of the screen by clicking on the Notification Center icon, then toggle the Show Alerts and Banners switch from Off to On; or just wait until tomorrow, when they’ll go back on automatically.

And an anonymous reader points out that, as of Safari 6 (which debuted with Mountain Lion, but is available for those still using Lion, as well), you no longer need to Control- or right-click on a bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar then fill out a dialog box in order to rename that bookmark. Now you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will be highlighted and you can then rename it right there.

When Apple ships a new version of the Mac OS, it generally takes no more than 24 hours for the questions to come pouring in. Such is exactly the case with Mountain Lion. You have questions, I have answers.

I’m not happy with Safari 6. When I type in a web address and press Return, I’m taken to a Google search page rather than the site I want to visit.

First, be a bit more patient. If you type and immediately press Return you won’t see Safari’s list of results—one of which will likely be the website you want to visit. Instead, type the important bits of the address, wait for the list appear, and select the site from that list.

Next, know that once you visit such and such a site, it will appear as the top hit on the next go-round. That is, unless you’ve cleared Safari’s History or first accessed that site with private browsing switched on. In such cases Safari has no memory that you’ve visited that site and so won’t propose it as a top hit.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Create your workflow

Launch Automator (in the /Applications folder) and in the template chooser that appears, select Service and click Choose. Configure the top of the workflow to read Service Receives No Input in Any Application. In the Actions library select Internet and drag the following actions into the workflow area: Get Specified URLs, Get Link URLs from Articles, and Display Webpages.

In the Get Specified URLs area, click Add and add the address of the RSS feed you wish to view in Safari—feed://rss.macworld.com/macworld/weblogs/mac911 for example. In the Get Link URLs from Articles action, be sure that the Only Return URLs In The Same Domain As The Original Webpage option is enabled. This ensures that you don't wind up with articles pulled from other websites. Save your workflow.

Now, if you click Run in the top-right corner of the workflow, Safari will launch and open multiple tabs, each displaying an article from the feed. In the future, when you want to run the workflow, simply select Services from any application’s application menu and choose your workflow from the submenu.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

As I explained in my guide to installing Mountain Lion, one of the requirements for installing OS X 10.8 is that you already have at least Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) installed. (Specifically, Mountain Lion requires OS X 10.6.8 or later.) The main practical reason for this requirement is that Mountain Lion is available only via the Mac App Store, and the Mac App Store debuted in Mac OS X 10.6—in other words, you need Snow Leopard or Lion just to be able to purchase and download Mountain Lion.

But once you’ve got your copy of Mountain Lion, can you install it onto a Mac or an external drive containing Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

It used to be that when upgrading to a major new version of OS X, installing over an existing OS X installation—for example, installing 10.3 over 10.2—entailed some degree of risk, as existing applications, add-ons, and support files could conflict with the new OS. For this reason, many people used to perform a “clean install”: wiping your hard drive (after backing it up, of course), installing the latest version of OS X, and then either using Setup/Migration Assistant to restore your applications and data, or manually copying over your data and reinstalling programs. (The Mac OS X 10.2 installer actually included an Archive And Install option, which preserved your original OS in a special folder while installing a completely new, fresh copy of 10.3. This feature was eliminated in the Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 installer.)

But a new download-and-install procedure debuted with Lion (OS X 10.7) and continues with Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8)—instead of a bootable installation DVD, you download the latest OS X installer to your Mac and install it from the same drive. As with Lion last year, many Mac users are asking two related questions: (1) Can you perform a clean install of Mountain Lion? and (2) Should you? Here’s my take on each of these questions.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

[Editor's note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

Like Lion (OS X 10.7) before it, Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) doesn’t ship on a disc—it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store, and that installer doesn’t require a bootable installation disc. But there are a good number of reasons you might want a bootable Mountain Lion installer on an external hard drive or a thumb drive (USB stick).

For example, if you want to install Mountain Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable install drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Mountain Lion installer to each computer. Also, if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable install drive makes a handy emergency disk. (Mountain Lion’s OS X Recovery feature, known as Lion Recovery prior to Mountain Lion’s release, is a big help here, but not all Macs get it—and if your Mac’s drive is itself having trouble, recovery mode may not even be available. Also, if you need to reinstall Mountain Lion, recovery mode requires you to download the entire 4GB+ installer again.) Finally, if you need to install Mountain Lion over Leopard—assuming you have the license to do so—a bootable install drive makes it easier to do so.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here