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!

All day on December 25, TUAW presents "Now What?" We've got first steps and recommendations for all the Apple gifts you (hopefully!) found under the tree today. Happy holidays!

Some good soul gifted you with a hard drive for the holidays. I can't think of a better gift! There are two ways to use that extra disk space -- the right way, which I'll get to in a moment, and the way many people do it, which is to just expand their disk space because they are running out of room.

I'm here to tell you that is the wrong thing to do with a new hard drive if you don't have a backup strategy already. Let's make a few assumptions here. The new drive has a USB 2.0 interface, or it has a Firewire 400 or 800 interface. It also is at least as large as your primary hard drive. Even better if it is bigger. Use that drive as a backup device, not for more disk space. Old hands around computers already know this, but if you are just getting started, it really is extra important to have all your files duplicated on another drive.

With any computer, stuff happens, like a sudden power surge, a drive failure, or a kid in the house who loves to see how the Mac trash can works. Can you really afford to lose all those pictures, emails, documents and CDs you lovingly ripped to iTunes? I didn't think so.

Getting a heavy duty back up is not too challenging. If you plug a brand new drive in, your Mac (assuming you have Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) will ask you if you'd like to use it as a Time Machine drive. Time Machine is Apple's built-in backup solution, and it is great for people who constantly change or update files and sometimes have a good reason to go back and get the old versions. The larger your extra drive, the further you can 'go back in time'. Time Machine allows you to restore all the data, but it can take several hours and may require your original system DVD if your machine isn't bootable.

Read on for more...

Just like every machine with moving parts, the hard drive that holds your iTunes library will eventually stop working. Read that line again - I didn't say might stop working, but will stop. It's going to happen, so be prepared.

Mark Nichols at zanshin recently wrote about his own experience of swapping and burning CDs and DVDs to back up iTunes purchases (something we blogged about awhile ago). That got me thinking about strategies for iTunes backups.

Time Machine and SuperDuper make it easy to execute local backups at regular intervals, but that's only half the battle. A good off-site backup of your mission-critical files (and I don't know about you, but for me, music is definitely considered mission-critical) is essential. You can go with services like Mozy or CrashPlan.

Personally, I've been very happy with Bandwagon. For only $12US per month, they provide the means to backup to either Amazon S3 or your own FTP server.

So, what's your solution? Please share in the comments, and save Mark another day of swapping discs in and out of his optical drive.

If you're like me, you probably spend a great deal of time using your Mac. From checking email, working with photos, surfing the web and paying bills to writing posts just like this, my Mac serves me well in so many ways. Using it every day as I do, I tend to create a massive amount of files, photos, emails and all of the other items that go along with daily Mac use.

The items that are created, modified and used every day are very important. So, to make sure I have access to them and that nothing bad happens to them, they need to be backed up so they're safe no matter what. But even though I know these files, folders and more need to be backed up, how do I do it in the most simple, effective and least time-consuming way?

Fortunately, there are several solutions available to Mac users to help ensure that their precious data is preserved. Most are simple to use and all provide an automated backup solution that once set up, doesn't rely on the user to make sure it works -- it all happens automatically on a particular schedule.

But which solution to choose? Here are the three simplest, cheapest and most reliable backup solutions for your consideration:

Pity the plight of Leopard users, who have wandered in the backup wilderness for so long, with only the ghost of H.G Wells to show them the path forward. Sure, Carbon Copy Cloner 3 has been a friend in time of need, but for those who crave a bootable clone that updates automatically and has a support team standing behind it, the long wait is over. SuperDuper! 2.5 has landed.

Dave Nanian has entertained us with the ongoing story of 2.5's road to release on the Shirt Pocket blog, including the pain and challenges of building compatibility with Time Machine's interesting new approaches to linking and storage. With backups now supporting both bootable clones to volumes shared with Time Machine (probably the perfect recovery option) and a free, works-forever trial still available (adding scheduling and smart copies costs $27.95), you owe it to yourself and your backups to give SD! a shot. We'll be testing out the Time Machine interoperability and will report back ASAP.

Thanks Laurie + everyone who sent this in.

This week on Ask TUAW we cover questions about reading the Mac partition while running Windows in Boot Camp, remote management, printing posters, AGP video cards for G5s, problems with Flash and more!

As always, leave your questions for next week in the comments.

Welcome to this week's edition of Ask TUAW. As you probably know from last week's column, Mat Lu, your favorite TUAW answer-man, is on vacation and this week I'm here to try and fill his very large shoes. We'll see how that goes but I feel optimistic.

Remember, if you want to ask us a question here at Ask TUAW, just post it in the comments of this post and we'll try to get it answered for you next week. Or, maybe one of your fellow commenters will give you the answer before that. Ok, now that that's done, let's get to this week's questions.

Last week, Mike did a great job with Ask TUAW and we had a bumper crop of questions. We won't be able to get to all of them this week, but we'll be looking at a number of different issues including: shifting times in iPhoto, getting a Mac and HDTV to work well together, comparing the 24" iMac to the Power Mac G5 in gaming, setting recurring events in iCal, backing up, customizing Mighty Mouse tracking, and getting Gmail in Mail.app.

Remember: everyone's welcome to post questions for Ask TUAW; we're happy to help! Just leave questions for next week in the comments. Now let's get to it.

Dave Nanian's highly regarded (and practically foolproof) backup utility SuperDuper! is now at version 2.1.4, available from the shirt-pocket.com website or via the auto update within SD itself. New and fixed items include:

• Displays are no longer kept active during a copy
• Scheduled copies work properly in Japanese locale
• Auto update mechanism extended to support OS X version-specific updates
• Extended attributes now copied for locked/unchangeable files
• Preliminary support for 10.5 "Leopard"
• Bug fix for scheduled copy logs written to the incorrect log file
• Re-fixed 10.3.9 image creation
• Fixed 5th parameter to before/after scripts
• Improved crontab handling
  

Now that Mike Bombich's legendary and free Carbon Copy Cloner is in beta for version 3 UB, SuperDuper may have a bit of a run for its $27.95. Glad to see that the wheels are still turning over there!

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]

Sometimes you have to suffer through the hard way once or twice just to find out... there's an easier way. I've posted recently about commercial backup applications that trigger a backup when you connect a target drive; I've posted on roll-your-own scripts that do the same thing. Over at MacOSXHints, an enterprising soul took the scripts from post #2 and enhanced/extended them. Great effort, everyone!

Then, along comes a comment to the scripting hint: "Hey, why not just use Do Something When?" Gosh, never heard of that, let's check it out... gadzooks! A preference pane that launches an application or document when a drive is mounted! Why, with that plus SuperDuper!, or Automator, or even rsync/rsnapshot and Platypus -- you'd be a backup machine.

So, the way to trigger backups on mount can be summed up thusly:

1. Create your backup script in your tool of choice and save as a document or applet.
2. Trigger that script when your drive is mounted, using DSW.
3. There is no step three. There's no step 3!

See additional notes and caveats after the jump.

Alternate title (and moral of the story): A good backup saves the day.

When I'm not gleefully blogging for TUAW in our secret, undisclosed location (Scott's livingroom), I'm working as the "Computer Guy" for a large, Mac-friendly company (yes, I'm essentially Nick Burns). On Sunday I received an urgent email regarding an iBook that would not boot. It held mission-critical files that would be needed on Monday (today). So, its owner dropped it off to me and I checked it out.

More after the jump...

Shirt Pocket software has just released version 2.1.2 of SuperDuper, their excellent backup software. This Universal Binary fixes some bugs and adds Growl support (something I think many more applications should support).

SuperDuper $27.95 for the full version, however if you download the software you can clone drives without registering. Remember that your data is only as safe as your last backup.

Backups are incredibly important, that's why you need to get  a system in place to make it as easy as possible to backup your Mac. SuperDuper! is a great way to kick start that system, and version 2.1.1 has just been released.

It is a Universal Binary (that showed up in 2.1), it can automount volumes, it is speedy, and best of all it is reliable. Aren't good backups worth $27.95? I think they are.