applesauce!

Despite being one of the most important utilities on the mac, i realized that many people have absolutely no idea how Time Machine works. I thought that this would be an apt time to do a quick tutorial on backing up your files since the new school semester is starting. Yes, B and A, I wrote this for you.

Most people I talk to tell me things like "I don't know how to use Time Machine" or "I just send stuff to myself via email" or "I back it up to a thumbdrive". Sure, you could do that, but those are additional steps needed in selecting your files, uploading them etc. With Time Machine, you literally just need to plug in your external hard drive, and let your mac run in the background. I typically run time machine once a week, just to make sure my important files are backed up. I've had far too many bad experiences where I've lost days or even weeks worth of work by accidentally deleting a file.

A very important aspect of Time Machine for me is the versioning ability - put simply, I can go back in time and select a specific version of a file (usually a word document that I have modified) and restore it. Another crucial aspect (but less frequently used) is when i reformat my mac (or get a new machine) and i want to transfer all my old files, system preferences etc. into the new machine. I just need to restore the entire backup from Time Machine and voila, good as your old machine!

For me Time Machine is a little bit like insurance - you hope you will never have to use it, but when you finally need it, you'll thank yourself for having the foresight to back up your documents and files.

I mean it when I say it is a two step process -

1. Plug in your hard drive

2. Click "Use as Backup Disk" when the pop-up dialog comes up.

It's a little bit pointless for me to cover the entire process in detail since it has been so extensively covered on the web, so here are a few useful links -

APPLE'S OFFICIAL GUIDE

CULT OF MAC WALKTHROUGH (WITH SCREENSHOTS)

For this post, I will highlight some slightly more advanced techniques that I prefer, specifically -

1. Excluding specific folders

2. Restoring specific files

3. Deleting ENTIRE backups

EXCLUDING SPECIFIC FOLDERS

This is particularly helpful when you have limited space on your backup disk, and you only need to back up certain folders.

Right-click the time machine icon in the dock and select "open time machine preferences"

Select options from the Time Machine window

Immediately, you should see a pop-up window that allows you to select folders to exclude from backup.

Click the + sign at the bottom left of the window and select the folders to exclude.

Unfortunately the Time Machine only works like a blacklist (an exclude list of the folders) rather than allowing you to select the folders that you really need. Hopefully apple will have this feature in future updates. For myself, I prefer to exclude my Music and Movies folders since I already back those up in the home server.

RESTORING SPECIFIC FILES

Knowing how to back up your Mac is crucial, but the ability to restore files changes the game. left click on the time machine icon in the doc again and you should enter the window below:

Do the following steps detailed on the screenshot -

Note: The backup versions are listed as horizontal bars on the right of the window. Simply select the date which you want to restore from and proceed from there.

[Click the screenshot to enlarge]

To exit the time machine window, simple hit up the "esc" key on your keyboard and you should be out.

**Delete backups

This helps you to reclaim your hard drive space. DO NOT delete your backups via finder it will take a very long time and you will probably end up messing up your permissions. Instead, enter time machine again, right click on any blank space and select 'delete backup' 

be patient it will take awhile to trash that backup, especially if a single backup averages more than 100 gb (like mine).

Minimize application windows into the dock icons:

i really hate clutter on my dock and there is no faster way to accumulate a long and messy dock than to minimize application windows onto the dock itself. This system preference minimizes the application window INTO the dock icon itself. Easy peasy!

Did you ever want to see a page you are reading on your Mac on your iPhone? Normally, that meant that you would have to manually type in the url into Mobile Safari. With AirLink, sharing between your desktop browser and mobile is just one click away

Mistakes made so far in making my clean install

forgetting to note down the extensions for the browsers

forgetting to sync bookmarks across the browsers (which means most of my bookmarks are gone!! gah. i could use the old backup from last year but most of my stuff won't be there anymore)

a whole boat load of songs (mostly rated!) are now missing from my itunes despite taking care to ensure that i backed up my songs. Having to manually re-add the songs is a real pain.

all my photoshop actions (even the ones i made myself!!) and brushes are now gone. i managed to save my lightroom presets from time machine, and my fonts have been placed so that's not too bad.

forgetting to note down my serial numbers! now i have to run a trial version of microsoft office.

steam is not loading! which is annoying me cos i have l4d2 for mac and i want to play it!

Adium Adobe lightroom 2 adobe photoshop alarms bettersnaptool bettertouchtool bowtie caffeine candybar Clipmenu Cloud dropbox Evernote filezilla final cut pro firefox get lyrical chrome handbrake hyperspaces iwork itunes marsedit moffice NNW onyx reeder secondbar selfcontrol simple comic Skype steam stuffit expander sugarsync transmission vlc vmware fusion zumocast

defaultfolderx

sorry for the long hiatus on the mac front. just finished papers today. there're a couple of things i want to get down to doing, first of which is to vanilla install snow leopard (maybe lion, i haven't quite decided) on my mac. So i'm in the middle of transferring my documents and photos and music out to the server, following which i'm going to do a full reinstall, which hopefully will get my mac back to brand new. I'm also doing a time machine back up in case anything goes wonky.

hopefully i'll be able to document the entire install process - a couple of things i'm doing before i actually get down to reformatting:

Transfer files and folders

Time machine back up

Note applications and preferences

i probably am one of a handful over on this side of the globe specifically up and waiting for ios 5 to drop, but I'm pleased to announce that it's finally here. you need to update itunes to 10.5 first though, and then it'll start to pick up the huge ios 5 update which clocks in at around 700 mb.

ios5 drops on october 12, US time...which would make it, wednesday, sg time at the earliest. i have to say that i am REALLY excited about it. it's taken the update a really long time and there are some key features/ improvements that have been a long time coming, to say the least.

to sum up, the key features i'm really looking forward to are -

icloud

imessage

the new notifications center

reminders

using the '+' on the hardware volume button as a camera shutter release.

this should clear up some of my major bugbears with the current ios.

notifications

i really hate it when a new notification comes in and it completely disrupts whatever i am working on at the moment. the new notifications does a clean job of keeping everything where you want them, without being disruptive.

reminders

secondly, FINALLY apple! a REMINDERS app native to the ios ecosystem. third party apps do a great job, but i just want something that integrates tightly with ical on the mac.

imessage

imessage won't be that amazing for me since I have whatsapp and I like to keep my non-iphone friends in the loop, but i like that there is compatibility for itouch and mac users so i can imessage any apple device and it transmits across all of the devices.

a good overview of the new features ios 5 brings is in the video.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. -- Steve Jobs

In a fit of impulsiveness and frustration at my inability to instill some self-discipline in myself, I went ahead and deleted ALL the games in my iPhone. Including all the paid ones like street fighter, cut the rope, flight control... My favourites like cut the rope, zombie highway (new addition), veggie samurai etc. I don't usually play the games but if I get really hooked on one I usually end up sacrificing sleep and productive hours playing it.

Apparently cold turkey works best for me. And in any case, it's not hard to find something to occupy me on the iPhone.

I find myself doing alot more reading on it now - especially long form articles (rather than books-still prefer the holding the physical copy). For those interested, the apps I use to save articles (and also syncs with the web service) are instapaper and readitlater. I shelled out money for readitlater pro but actually there really is no need to. The free app does the job just as well with unlimited articles and offline saving (incredibly important for places with zero wifi or 3G connectivity). But I suppose paying for the full app is just my way of saying thank you to the makers for a great product!

Other things that I do in replacement of playing games -  Watching videos- I managed to grab vlc before it went off the AppStore so I transfer videos to watch before converting. But I recently discovered player x which provides subtitle support so I might switch over from vlc pretty soon. I also blog alot more now because I find that usually by the time I get home I've pretty much forgotten all that i wanted to say.

Rss reading- I do alot more RSS reading on the iphone now. I don't like having to visit each site individually so I hook up the RSS feeds with my google reader. If you haven't tried using an RSS service, I highly recommend this as a tool to save you lots of time scrambling all about the interwebz. MobileRSS still provides one of the most complete RSS experiences for me because of the number of web services tie-ups - email, evernote, readitlater and instapaper. MobileRSS hooks up with my google reader account which has 400+ feeds so I have enough of a field day wading through all of them.