Time Machine backups can be triggered remotely thanks to SSH (Remote Login) and the command line. This is an excellent solution to use if you left the home or office without making an important backup, though the SSH requirement does add a potential layer of complexity that may make it more appropriate for advanced users. … Read More
Time Machine backups can be encrypted right from your Mac. This means the backed up data is extremely safe from prying eyes and the very unlikely event of a cracking attempt, and it also means you’ll need a password to access the encrypted backups yourself. Enabling encrypted backups in Time Machine for Mac OS X … Read More
Mac OS X Lion introduced the file locking feature, which causes any files to automatically lock themselves after a period of time to prevent accidental edits from occurring. You’ve probably seen the resulting message lock before, informing you a file has been locked because recent changes haven’t been made. The time it takes for that … Read More
Apple has released a supplemental update to Mac OS X 10.7.3 to address a potential issue with restoring from Time Machine backups. The update can be found from Software Update via the Apple menu or downloaded directly from Apple. Installing the update does not require a reboot. Despite being a minor update, it is … Read More
Every Mac owner should be using Time Machine, it’s by far the easiest and most painless backup solution, running in the background and allowing for easy recovery of files or the entire operating system should something go wrong during an OS X update or otherwise. There’s no way around it, having backups of your Mac … 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
Mac OS X Lion introduced automatic file locking for any file that hasn’t been edited recently. You’ll have noticed this when you try and open an older file and make changes to it, a dialog box asks to duplicate the file or to manually unlock it. This is fine for files that you don’t want … Read More
The default behavior for Spotlight is to start indexing any drive as soon as it’s connected to a Mac, a task that can take a very long time with larger volumes. The problem is that for larger external backup drives and Time Machine volumes, you don’t necessarily want it indexed by Spotlight. This is particularly … Read More
Modern versions of Mac OS X include a great tool called tmutil that lets you interact with with Time Machine from the command line. It’s a powerful utility that has a ton of options, and we’ve used it before to disable local snapshots, but for the purposes here we are going to use tmutil to … 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
Using the command line in OS X, you can enable a hidden feature in Time Machine that allows you to backup your Mac to a non-native volume, including Networked Attached Storage devices, network volumes, or even a Windows PC. This is generally best for advanced Mac users, as it must be enabled through a defaults … Read More
Time Machine is a very convenient backup solution for Mac users, but typically requires an external drive to backup to. If you’ve got a network with an extra Windows or Linux PC hanging around with tons of disk space, you can get Time Machine to backup to that computers excess disk space instead of an … Read More
Letting Time Machine run on a routine backup schedule is important for all Macs, but there also times where you’ll want to initiate a backup yourself, like before installing system updates or major Mac OS X upgrades. If you find yourself needing to initiate a manual Time Machine backup, you’ll be happy to know it … Read More
If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon. There can be a variety of reasons the backups become delayed, and if you’re curious why this happens we’ll go … Read More
