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If you have a lot of data, the first back-up will take you a long time even on a fast connection incrementals will speed through. It won’t backup your OS files, so if you want to avoid the pain of hand-restoring your system, you’ll want to double up with one of the other methods, as well. Off-Site Incremental Method – If you don’t want to spend the cash on an external drive and you’re more worried about your data than your OS, I recommend Backblaze ($4 per month for unlimited storage). I like these drives from Western Digital they’re affordable and easy to store. If you don’t want to spend the cash on a Time Capsule, you can opt to plug in an external drive. The subsequent, incremental backups take far less time since they only back-up items that have changed. The initial backup will take awhile, so plug your Mac into the Time Capsule’s ethernet port and let it run overnight. I like the freedom of no wires, so I back up over WiFi to a Time Capsule ($299). Local Incremental Method – You can use Time Machine to perform incremental backups. Step 1: Backup Data and Repair Permissionsġ) Backup your data using one of the following methods: Luckily, it’s usually pretty easy to repair permissions.īelow are a few steps that will (A) Fix common issues on Macs, and (B) Keep your Mac running smoothly. Permissions set the read/write characteristics of every file and who those files can be viewed by it’s an old system that comes from Mac OS X’s Unix underpinnings. Most software glitches on OS X are permissions-based. If you have alternative solutions or more elegant fixes, please let me know in the comments! Enter Jared We’ll start with an e-mail thread from Jared Cocken, Creative Director of The Wonderfactory, then we’ll lead into personal suggestions. It won’t be fancy, and it won’t impress the Carnegie Mellon CS crowd, but it will get the job done with minimal headache and paradox of choice. My hope is that this post somehow helps you to do exactly that. First and foremost: It need not be complicated to bulletproof (or unf*ck) your Mac.īut what if your Mac crashes or is stolen? Does that goddamn spinning beachball mean that my computer’s going to implode? Is there a simple way to sleep soundly at night? So, I put a notice out on the Internets asking for help and learned a lot about Macs in the process. Much of the world has felt the same at one point or another: “My is screwed, but I don’t even know where to start.” Cars? Computers? Health? We’re all ignorant of something, as mastering everything just isn’t an option. Alas, “ruh-roh” realizations alone do not diagnose problems, let alone fix them. I’m no computer scientist, but that seemed like an abnormally long time. It displayed “Indexing Spotlight,” with an estimated finish time of several MILLION hours.
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Not long ago, I went to use Spotlight (cmd + spacebar) and, well, it looked a little off. But problems do crop up, even with the venerated Macintosh.
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