Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about VOIP apps on the iPhone, auto-tagging music, Boot Camp, replacing a hard drive and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

About 13GB of data was accidentally deleted from my account on my Mac yesterday. Fortunately, due to an aggressive backup system, I was able to recover all of the files.

I was trying to test out a tip sent to the TUAW team, which led me to log into (and out of) the "Guest" account several times. One of the logins seemed to hang, which triggered a memory about a data loss bug in Snow Leopard which I had read about (and which Apple is now acknowledging in "extremely rare" cases, per Cnet). I immediately reached around the back of my iMac and shut it down.

At first I thought everything was OK, but then Dropbox started asking me to configure settings, as if it was the first time the app was run. Fortunately, due to the new "LAN sync" feature in recent Dropbox betas, the iMac copied my Dropbox files from my MacBook Pro on the same network in a matter of seconds, rather than having to download almost 2GB of data from Dropbox's servers.

I thought that was the end of the problems, until I saw that my Terminal customizations were missing. Then I noticed that a few other applications were not functioning correctly. Suddenly I realized that I had most likely suffered more data loss than was immediately obvious.

Read on to see what had to be done to recover after the data loss occurred.

We're mere hours away from Snow Leopard's arrival tomorrow. As an upgrade for Leopard users, there have been many questions about how it can be installed. How will Apple enforce this "Leopard users only" requirement? Will they ask you to insert your Leopard DVD, or just check for a Leopard installation on your current hard drive? [There's a hint from Walt Mossberg that this Leopard requirement may be a little bit lax.]

Users who have installed beta versions report that they have been able to do an "Erase and Install" of Snow Leopard, meaning that you can erase your old installation of Mac OS X if you wish to start "fresh" with Snow Leopard.

The biggest question is this: what happens in, say, six months, when you decide that you'd like to reinstall Snow Leopard, or install it onto a newly formatted drive? Will you have to install Leopard and then install Snow Leopard over it? We certainly hope not, and have heard some reports that suggest you won't have to do this, but nothing will be official until we can test Snow Leopard for ourselves.

What are your installation options? The cheapest is obviously the $29.00 upgrade version, but there's also the $49 "Family Pack" for the multi-Mac homes. There is also the Mac Box Set which was recently introduced. If you want to upgrade from Tiger <del>(or earlier)</del> to Snow Leopard, this is your "official" upgrade path. For $169 you get 10.6, iLife '09, and iWork '09. This is also the best option if you want to absolutely guarantee that you can install Snow Leopard on a new drive without Leopard already installed. Several users I spoke with this week indicated they either have othered the Mac Box Set or plan to do so to make sure they have a "full install" Snow Leopard DVD. It's a great deal considering the "sticker price" of each, plus it's only $40 more than what Leopard originally cost.

Correction: Ryan Trevisol correctly points out in the comments that all Intel Macs shipped with Tiger, so there is no "or earlier" regarding Snow Leopard upgrading.

It's time once again for Ask TUAW! For this round we take questions about cleaning a malfunctioning Mighty Mouse, opening files and applications with the return key, expanding a Boot Camp partition, finding alternatives to Adobe Acrobat, caring for your notebook battery, and more

As always, your suggestions are welcome. 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 Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

I'm a big fan of SuperDuper! myself, but Carbon Copy Cloner has also long been a great, low cost option for cloning hard disks in OS X (indeed it's been around longer). Mike Bombich has now released version 3.1 of CCC implementing rsync 3.0.0 "to provide even greater fidelity when backing up using the 'Copy selected items' backup method." Other improvements includes an updated interface and various bugfixes, etc.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a free download from Bombich Software (donation requested).

[via TidBITS]

If you aren't using Carbon Copy Cloner, then you're missing out. This gem of an app is the easiest way to clone one Mac drive to another (you can even clone bootable volumes, so you can backup your main Mac drive to a stand by drive and boot right off of it). In addition to the clone ability, Carbon Copy Cloner makes backing up a breeze, and it is easier with Carbon Copy Cloner 3.

The new version of CCC brings with it better data synchronization, block level copying, and some nice UI enhancements.

Carbon Copy Cloner is donation-ware, so it is fully functional but if you use it you should really considering donating some cash to help with the development of the app.

Back in the day, Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner was one of those must-have Mac apps. It was the first solution for making bootable backups to an external hard drive. Unfortunately, CCC had not been updated in quite some time (2003) and its former place has been taken on many Macs by the excellent SuperDuper! (which I use myself, but which runs $27.95). Mike has finally come out with an update for CCC, and has released a beta of version 3 of CCC. According to Mike, CCC3 was "completely rebuilt from the ground up to bring a new suite of features." Among these new features, are a revamped interface, network backups, "advanced scheduling capabilities" and more. Perhaps best of all, however, is that CCC3 is now a Universal application.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0b4 is a free download, but Mike asks for donations. It looks like CCC3 could be a great, less expensive alternative to SuperDuper! once more.

[Via theappleblog]

For those of you, who, as I do, know the joy of backing up your digital life with Carbon Copy Cloner, I've spotted some news that bears some consideration before upgrading to Tiger. In this discussion thread, Mike Bombich, the creator of Carbon Copy Cloner (or CCC for short), notes: "Apple has broken all of my apps under Tiger. Its a really stupid, simple little bug that affects authentication. I'll fix my apps as soon as possible but I'm hoping Apple will fix the bug."

So, you can still create a fully bootable copy of your current set up on an external drive using CCC before you update to Tiger, and if you hate Tiger, you can boot from that external drive and reclone your pre-Tiger drive back over to your primary drive; however, once you've upgraded, you're going to be stuck without your most beloved backup solution until either Apple or Bombich get around to fixing this authentication bug.

Consider my pre-Tiger buzz officially killed.

[via Accelerate Your Mac]