Backing up iTunes

Just like every machine with moving parts, the hard drive that holds your iTunes library will eventually stop working. Read that line again - I didn’t say might stop working, but will stop. It’s going to happen, so be prepared.

Mark Nichols at zanshin recently wrote about his own experience of swapping and burning CDs and DVDs to back up iTunes purchases (something we blogged about awhile ago). That got me thinking about strategies for iTunes backups.

Time Machine and SuperDuper make it easy to execute local backups at regular intervals, but that’s only half the battle. A good off-site backup of your mission-critical files (and I don’t know about you, but for me, music is definitely considered mission-critical) is essential. You can go with services like Mozy or CrashPlan.

Personally, I’ve been very happy with Bandwagon. For only $12US per month, they provide the means to backup to either Amazon S3 or your own FTP server.

So, what’s your solution? Please share in the comments, and save Mark another day of swapping discs in and out of his optical drive.[Read]

Popularity: 9% [?]

Microsoft compatibility problems, iPhone charging, Mail bouncing, syncing, and more

In this riveting episode of Ask TUAW we’re catching up a bit on the backlog, so we’ll be looking at a couple of problems generated by Microsoft products (Hotmail and Photo Story), charging an iPhone from a sleeping Mac, syncing personal data between two user accounts, using a Mac mini as a backup server, and more.

As always your suggestions are most welcome, and 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 OS X, as certain answers will vary between different Macs and Tiger vs. Leopard, etc. (we’ll assume you’re running Leopard if you don’t specify). And now, on to the questions!

Andrew asks

I’m running the current version of Leopard on a PowerBook G4 (1.5GHz with 1.25GB memory). I was wondering if there is a way to shut the lid on my laptop while still keeping power to the USB ports. I would like to be able to put my computer to sleep and keep it charging my iPhone..

Unfortunately, no; this is a hardware issue. In fact, Apple recently added this feature to the iMac line. However, according to this thread and this hint the FireWire port is still powered while the computer is asleep. While you can’t sync your iPhone over FireWire, you can possibly use that to charge it with a FireWire to Dock connector cable and if indeed if you use this double headed cable ($19) you don’t even have to switch (i.e. plug in both at the same time).

pjones asks

When using iChat, I love that the icon bounces in the dock when I receive a new message. Is there a way to assign this same icon “bounce” behavior to the Mail.app dock icon, so that it bounces when I get new mail?

As another reader pointed out this is easily accomplished with a Mail.app rule. Just configure a rule in the Mail.app preferences as follows:

Kyle asks

I have recently switched to a mac mini 1.83Ghz running leopard and now use a .mac e-mail address. Previously I used a windows live hotmail account as my primary e-mail and I am wondering if there is any way to have e-mails to the hotmail account delivered to the “mail” application on my mac?

I have a very short-term solution for you: the Mac OS X HTTP Mail Plugin will allow you to download Hotmail into Mail.app. However, the developer has a note saying that “Microsoft is closing us down” as of June 30, 2008 because they’re replacing WebDAV access with a new proprietary (and undocumented) technology called “DeltaSync.” Now if you’re willing to pay you can get POP3 access with a Hotmail Plus account. Finally, there’s also a third-party service called IzyMail that will supposedly allow you to access Hotmail with an IMAP mail client, however I have never used it and cannot comment on its reliability.

My wife had this problem when switching and I finally just switched her over to Gmail. If I were you, I would go ahead and just pull the band aid off switch away from Hotmail. Microsoft’s mail service is just not competitive anymore and it’s a bear to deal with as you’re finding out.

Adam asks

Some time ago, in the not so distant past, I noticed that the .Mac sync icon started to appear on the top menu bar for me. I have a MBP running Leopard. I have never synced anything with .Mac, yet so much as subscribed so I have no clue how this appeared. Now I want to know how to make it disappear, the .Mac button in Settings does not help me out as far as I can tell.

The sync item will also run for the iPhone so that may be how it got there. Anyway you can remove in either of two ways. Just hold down the ⌘ key and drag it off the menubar. Or you’ll find the checkbox setting in the Sync tab of the .Mac Preference Pane.

joeyjoe serially asks

I use my MacBook at work and home, so I created two accounts on it. I did this primarily because I need easy access to different applications at work and at home and because I didn’t want anyone to accidently stumble onto my personal files at work. This setup, however, has not really worked because I would still like to keep my email, contact, calendar and applications in sync between the work and home accounts. The simple solution I suppose would be to use one account and set up two different docks and desktops, but this isn’t even possible with Spaces. What do you suggest?

You could try using one account and keeping all of your personal files in an encrypted FileVault created with Disk Utility. Alternately, you could continue using separate accounts and adopt some kind of syncing solution. The obvious one is .Mac, however, you might also consider using something like IMAP for email and something like Google for calendar and contact information. You can even sync Google’s services with iCal using BusySync ($25) or Spanning Sync ($25/year). Address Book syncing is now possible with Syncman ($15) though apparently Address Book syncing is coming to the others as well. Having lots of this kind of data online as other advantages as well, so that might be worth looking into.
I created a Windows Media File using Microsoft’s excellent slideshow program, Photo Story, however I cannot view it on my Mac. The WMV file that Photo Story creates cannot be played in anything before Windows Media Player 10, and as far as I can tell, the latest version of Flip for Mac only covers files created for Windows Media Player 7.0 and earlier. I can’t find anything to play this thing!

I found this site with some suggestions. Basically, it is a codec problem and so the suggested solutions are converting the file to a QuickTime MOV with the file conversion site Zamzar or (if you have access to Windows) convert the file to a Flip4Mac compatible version with the Windows Media Encoder.
computergeeksjw asks

I have a Rage 128 video card that came with my old iMac. I’ve looked and looked, but I can’t seem to find a driver anywhere. ATI’s website only has drivers for Windows. I wanted to set up Extended Desktops but my Mac won’t recognize it. Apple Technical Support @ 1-800-My-Apple said to get a driver, but I can’t find one:). Any solutions/suggestions?

Unfortunately, I do not think Extended Desktop is possible with the Rage 128. The hack to enable this on older machines is called Screen Spanning Doctor but the Rage 128 is explicitly not supported.

Jason asks

…. My utopian goals for the backup system are 1) to have an automatic system that takes the responsibility out of it as much as possible, 2) have an offsite - preferably, online - backup of my photos and music (because those are virtually irreplaceable - especially the photos), and 3) if possible, have online access to all my personal files for when I travel (a lot)…. Is it possible to use the Mini as a backup & Time Machine server (with a huge HDD attached via USB) without having to buy Leopard Server ($500) to expose the external disk?

Yes. Backup to an AFP-shared HFS+ disk mounted on any Leopard computer (Client or Server) is officially supported by Time Machine. What I would do is buy a large external FireWire drive and hook it to the Mac mini. Then, share that drive with AFP and use it with Time Machine and/or SuperDuper!.

Finally as far as accessing file from the road goes there are a number of ways to accomplish this from Back to My Mac and iChat Screen Sharing, to others like iGet ($49). You might also want to check out a little application we posted on before called FarFinder ($35).

Sam asks

If I have a 1st gen iPhone and want to get a 3G one, could I just buy a 3G phone and put my 1st gen sim card in?

You’ll probably have to unlock the new phone to get this to work. It’s obviously not known yet whether the unlocking tools with work on the 3G iPhone.

Joel asks

I am thinking of an application, but I can’t remember it’s name, and I can’t find it via searching for the life of me! It was talked about on TUAW, and what it does is, it allows you to make a bookmark of a website, and it treats the bookmark like an application that you can open separately, and keep on your dock and stuff.

I’m not 100% sure what application it is you’re referring to. I suppose you know that you can just drag a URL to the right side of your Dock (assuming it’s on the bottom) and add a spring icon to launch any website.

If what you want is a site-specific browser, you can check out Fluid or Prism — these custom builds of the Webkit and Firefox browser engines can create one-off apps that launch a specified website in a standalone window.

[Via TUAW]

Popularity: 50% [?]

Mac 101: Back it Up

If you’re like me, you probably spend a great deal of time using your Mac. From checking email, working with photos, surfing the web and paying bills to writing posts just like this, my Mac serves me well in so many ways. Using it every day as I do, I tend to create a massive amount of files, photos, emails and all of the other items that go along with daily Mac use.

The items that are created, modified and used every day are very important. So, to make sure I have access to them and that nothing bad happens to them, they need to be backed up so they’re safe no matter what. But even though I know these files, folders and more need to be backed up, how do I do it in the most simple, effective and least time-consuming way?

Fortunately, there are several solutions available to Mac users to help ensure that their precious data is preserved. Most are simple to use and all provide an automated backup solution that once set up, doesn’t rely on the user to make sure it works — it all happens automatically on a particular schedule.

But which solution to choose? Here are the three simplest, cheapest and most reliable backup solutions for your consideration:

Time Machine (free if you use OSX 10.5 aka Leopard) — Time Machine has the virtue of being included with Leopard, being very simple to use and is probably adequate for most of your backup needs. You go to the Apple Menu in the top left corner of the screen, select System Prefs and then select Time Machine. Then, simply flip a switch to turn it on.

Once its on, it will ask you which drive you want to backup to and then, after you select one, Time Machine does its thing automatically. The next time you will need to interact with Time Machine is when the drive you’ve selected to back up to starts to get full. Then, it will ask you if you want to delete older backups. Until then, it will simply do its thing.

Like several of these other solutions, you will need a drive to backup to. Usually, an external Firewire or USB 2.0 drive works best. Its also best if the drive you are using is solely dedicated to backup and not used for anything else. For a good primer on external backup drives, take a look at our own Robert Palmer’s recent post on the subject.

Backup (free if you’re a .Mac member) — Apple’s other backup solution is only available to .Mac members. With this software, you need to download and install it and then set it up to backup various files, folders or your entire Home Folder — if that’s what you want it to do. Its not as simple to use as Time Machine, but once you get the hang of it, it works fine and also functions automatically on a schedule you can set.

Backup is also the preferred solution for some users due to issues they have had with Time Machine. Its also a more mature program and offers a little more flexibility than Time Machine. However, the cost of it when purchased with a .Mac membership at $99.00, may cause more people to consider Time Machine — especially if they’re already upgrading to or running Leopard.

Superduper! ($27.95) — Like Apple’s Backup, this is also a piece of software you need to download and install. However, unlike Backup, you don’t pick and choose which files, folders or whatever you want to backup. Instead, Superduper! simply makes an exact duplicate of your boot hard drive to another drive at an interval you can set yourself — usually daily.

One of the best things about Superduper! is its simplicity. You don’t have to decide what to back up so you won’t ever forget to include something. Plus, as the program makes an exact copy of your hard drive, you can also start up from that copy should something ever go wrong with your main drive — which makes troubleshooting that much easier. Also, this is not a feature available if you’re using Time Machine and/or Backup.

Plus, once you set it you can forget it as the program is rock solid and compatible with the latest versions of OSX and can also work in tandem with Time Machine — the solution I currently employ.

Conclusion

Obviously, backup is important and choosing a backup solution is an important decision. For many people, the simplicity of Time Machine and its interface will be a good choice. However, Time Machine does have its issues so others may turn to the reliability of Superduper! or the flexibility of Apple’s Backup.

For my own Macs, a combination of both Time Machine and Superduper! is the backup method of choice — with each backing up to a separate external Firewire drive. The nice thing about this setup is that you have the advantages of Time Machine and the ability to restore individual files, folders or other missing items and you also have the ability to boot from your Superduper! drive to help troubleshoot problems and in the event of a disaster — such as the complete failure of your internal boot drive. For dealing with the possibility that your backup drive itself might become inaccessible or damaged (in a robbery or house fire), you could employ another drive that rotates to your office or another location — or check out an online backup service like Mozy.

Whichever choice you end up making to satisfy your backup needs, be it one or more of the above solutions or something else, the important thing is to have a backup solution in place no matter what. You don’t want to find out the hard way the consequences of not having one.

Popularity: 10% [?]