Time Machine is an easy Mac backup solution built into Mac OS X that allows for automated continual backups of files, apps, and the operating system itself. Not only does Time Machine make it incredibly easy to maintain frequent automatic backups of a Mac, it also makes it equally simple to restore from a backup … Read More
If you regularly make backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the computer with iTunes, you may rarely run into an error when iTunes reports it’s unable to backup the iOS device. This is usually accompanied by a very vague error message like “iTunes could not back up the iPhone “(name)” because the … Read More
Duplicating the iPhone backup files may be desirable or necessary for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to make a manual backup of your iOS backups, or even if it’s just to move it onto another drive so that you can clear out some disk space. There are a few ways to go about doing … Read More
Did you know you can set iPhone photos to automatically backup to Dropbox? You can really never have too many backups of your most important files, and since our iPhone photos and pictures often fall into the ‘very important’ category, having an automatic backup solution directly from your iPhone can be a good idea. Yes, … Read More
Having reliable and regular backups of your Mac should be considered a mandatory part of maintenance, and for most users Time Machine provides that with easy and peace of mind. But what if you want multiple backups stored in different places, like a backup at home, and another at the office, or perhaps a backup … Read More
Time Machine is the simplest way to keep a reliable backup of everything on your Mac, but sometimes we don’t want every file or folder saved, or maybe you just no longer need a given directory to be preserved by external backups. In these situations, removing backups of any specific file or folders, or even … Read More
You can switch hard drives that Time Machine backs up to easily, but to properly migrate from one Time Machine backup drive to another and preserve the existing archived backups, you’ll want to take a few additional steps to insure that your existing prior backups are safely moved over as well. This is an easy … Read More
Having regular backups of your Mac is a necessity, and there is really no easier way to consistently back up your Mac than by using the excellent Time Machine feature of OS X. But with the enormous size of external hard drives and their prices becoming cheaper and cheaper, it’s not always necessary to dedicate … Read More
If you have run out of iCloud storage for backups of either your Mac or iOS stuff, you can now easily manage existing backups and data for all devices right on your Mac from OS X.
For many of us, our contacts list are the most important part of our iPhones and what we care most about backing up. It’s easy to re-download apps and adjust settings, but it can be very difficult to rebuild a large contact list of names, email addresses, and phone numbers if you lose it. For … Read More
You can continue to create local backups of iOS devices even if you rely primarily on iCloud backing up iPhone and iPad and for storing those iOS backups. This is a really useful technique if an iPhone, iPad, or iPod ran out of iCloud storage space and you don’t want to deal with managing it … Read More
You can create an image of a Mac hard drive with the help of a free third party utility called Carbon Copy Cloner. The resulting disk image will be saved as the familiar .dmg format, which has a number of potential uses ranging from creating a drive clone for backup purposes, restoring the image elsewhere … Read More
Running out of iCloud backup capacity happens quick whether you have a single iPhone or a handful of iOS devices. You’ll know this has happened because you get a friendly popup informing you of “Not Enough Storage” and that the automatic backup can not occur as a result. So what to do? There’s really two … Read More
Having a backup of your iOS device and its settings is important, so rather than completely disabling iOS backups in iTunes, you can choose to selectively disable only the automatic backup process. This is a much better solution because it allows you to create and retain local backups of an iPad, iPhone, or iPod when … Read More
Anytime an iOS device is connected to a computer it will sync and backup the device, and though the syncing process can be annoying sometimes, the backup process should be considered crucial so that you always have a way to restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod should anything go wrong. With that said, there are … Read More
So you just upgraded to a new iPad, and you want to move all of your apps, pictures, settings, and data from an old iPad to the new iPad, right? Doing this is easy, you can go the post-PC route with iCloud (recommended), or the old fashioned way with iTunes, we’ll show you both. Transfer … Read More
Do you have a huge folder or ten you don’t want to include in Time Machine backups? Maybe just a few files that aren’t necessary to keep, or that you have a different backup solution for? Maybe you just want to slim down the size of a backup, or speed things up by excluding a … Read More
Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion initiates a sometimes useful, sometimes not feature: local backups. Called snapshots, this seems to be kicked off when your primary Mac is a laptop and the Time Machine backup is an external drive, so OS X Lion compensates for the potentially unavailable external disk by keeping an additional … Read More
