Time Machine Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Use tmutil to take control of Time Machine in Mountain Lion

by Mike Schramm (Nov 7th, 2012)

Time Machine works best when you use it as it's designed: You simply let it run in the background and do its thing, only bothering it when you have to go back and get an old version of a document out. But if you ever want to do anything a little crazy with Time Machine ("adopting" a backup ...

Lessons from Sandy: CrashPlan and the importance of off-site backup

by Erica Sadun (Nov 6th, 2012)

When disaster happens, you want to make sure your data is safe. The reality of Hurricane Sandy demonstrated how important it is to store copies of your most precious records, pictures and correspondences off-site. If you are a CrashPlan backup customer, the company is making it easier for you ...

Mountain Lion 101: Multi-volume Time Machine

by Michael Rose (Jul 25th, 2012)

It's the little things. Since the introduction of Time Machine in OS X Leopard, Apple's built-in backup utility has provided a safety net for millions of Mac users by delivering effective, dead-simple data protection. Every hour, the latest versions of our files are neatly copied to external ...

Getting ready for Mountain Lion: Backups

by Steven Sande (Jun 15th, 2012)

Although most Mac OS X upgrades go smoothly, there's always a chance that something can go wrong. Hundreds of thousands of files are changed during an upgrade, so there's a possibility that one or more of those changes can cause your Mac to decide to not boot up properly. Without a backup, your ...

Apple wins patents for Smart Covers, iTunes Store, Time Machine and more

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Apr 25th, 2012)

Patently Apple reports that Apple had acquired a number of new patents to its arsenal today. Among the 25 patents issued to the company include: A second patent for the iTunes store and its rental system, originally filed in January 2008 A fifth patent for Time Machine, covering a user ...

Dear Aunt TUAW: Should I clean up my drive?

by Erica Sadun (Feb 14th, 2012)

Dear Aunt TUAW, I was looking at some apps that claim to help remove stored caches and temporary files. Are these apps a good way to clean up my Mac and remove temporary files? Your loving nephew, Chris Dear Chris, Auntie is super-paranoid about these third-party tools. When it comes to clearing ...

Review: ioSafe SoloPRO fireproof external hard drive

by Michael Grothaus (Oct 15th, 2011)

If there's one thing I always tell people who work with valuable, irreplaceable data it's "back up your files!" Thankfully most of us do back up our data. We usually use an external hard drive. Or sometimes, we only rely on cloud-based storage, like Dropbox or Apple's soon to be defunct iDisk. ...

Dolly Drive brings the Time Machine cloud closer to European customers

by Steven Sande (Aug 16th, 2011)

Everyone's favorite sheep-shaped online backup point, Dolly Drive, has opened a data center in Rome, Italy to give European Mac users faster Time Machine backups to the cloud. The new facility is part of a planned grid of data centers for the relatively new (less than a year old) and ...

Time Machine hand-holding: How do you say goodbye to data?

by Erica Sadun (Jul 23rd, 2011)

I've been good this past year. Very good. I have rigorously adhered to the TiNo philosophy, which states that so long as your TiVo, EyeTV, or other recording device has captured a program, it is your prerogative to delete that program whenever you feel like it. Whether you watched it or ...

Lion and Time Machine: Offline backups and document locks

by Steven Sande (Jul 20th, 2011)

OS X Lion has tweaked Apple's Time Machine backup app a bit, but the changes are pretty significant. Now, if you're away from your external backup drive or Time Capsule for a few days, Time Machine actually caches a local "backup" of documents and system changes on your boot drive, waiting for an ...

Western Digital's 3 TB MyBook Studio perfect for pre-Lion backups

by Steven Sande (Jul 16th, 2011)

Are you about to upgrade your Mac to OS X Lion? One recommendation from the TUAW staff is that you do a complete backup of your Snow Leopard installation before you start. With many Mac internal drives nearing the 1 to 2 TB range in size, how do you back up the drive and still have a hard disk ...

Dolly Drive 1.2 expands to 2 terabytes, adds seeding program

by Dave Caolo (May 17th, 2011)

We met Dolly Drive when it was barely a week old. This week, version 1.2 became available with increased storage capacity, increased upload speed and incremental cloning. Dolly Drive is a cloud-based backup solution that works with Apple's Time Machine. Once configured, Time Machine treats it as ...

Terminal Tip: Find out which files won't be backed up

by Samuel Gibbs (Apr 12th, 2011)

Backing up is one of the most important things you can do on a Mac, and thankfully, it's a pretty trivial affair with Time Machine built right in. Of course, when you're looking at what needs backing up, people often overlook what doesn't need backing up (or isn't, but should be). A good ...

Apple wins appeal in Time Machine, Cover Flow patent ruling

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 5th, 2011)

US District Judge Leonard Davis threw out a US$625.5 million patent infringement verdict against Apple involving its Cover Flow, Time Machine and Spotlight technology for the Mac. In 2008, Mirror Worlds filed a patent infringement lawsuit accusing Apple of infringing on four of the company's ...

World Backup Day: Turn, turn, turn + more giveaways

by Michael Rose (Mar 31st, 2011)

Happy World Backup Day! We can't really emphasize this strongly enough: you need good backups, and you need them now. That's why we've joined the cause for data saving with tips, techniques and giveaways all day today. For Mac users running Leopard or Snow Leopard (10.5 or 10.6), the good news ...