Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about the Trash, Migration Assistant, Safari Bookmarks, Mac mini Server, Windows and Mac file sharing and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions 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 Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

CL asks:

Is there any way to just delete a single item in the trash can? I only see options to empty the entire trash can?

Unfortunately, as they say in computer parlance "That's a feature, not a bug." At the moment, Apple only allows you to go for an "all or nothing" approach to emptying the trash. Of course, the best solution is to only put things in the trash you want to delete. But I'm sure you already thought of that.

Lamdavidortez asks:

I will be upgrading from my current February 2007 Macbook Pro that is running Leopard to a new October 2009 MacBook Pro that is running Snow Leopard I plan on transferring my data via the "Migration Assistant" but being that this is the first time I perform this type of operation ... I want to make sure that I do not run into any issues.

Are there any precautions I should take? My other concern is that I backup my current 2007 MBP via Time Machine to my Time Capsule. What will happen to that data once I switch over to the 2009 MBP? Will I still have access to that data? Will it be rendered useless?

Migration Assistant has been around for several years now and has evolved and become better with each successive update. There was a time when I would never consider using it and did things the manual way by copying each and every thing I needed individually from an old Mac to a new one. Now, Migration Assistant is good enough and, more importantly, reliable enough to be used on its own. So, migrate away.

Many Mac pros are unnaturally fond of SuperDuper!, the accurately-named backup utility from Shirt Pocket Software. The application is inexpensive (free, actually, if you don't want advanced features -- the best US$27.95 you've ever spent, otherwise), powerful, and easily makes fully-bootable backups of your Mac.

The latest version of SuperDuper! has just been released. Version 2.6.2 is now available and has a ton of new features and fixes. Here's the scoop from the revision history:

• Significant copy speed improvements (up to 2 times faster!)
• Preserves compression when copying
• Fixed extra copying under Snow Leopard
• Scheduled copies in old format are now disabled and we prompt the user to recreate
• Scheduled copies work on Japanese systems and with more Unicode/composed character drive names
• Backup-on-mount should work on 10.4.11
• Adjusted SDUtil path to improve robustness when application is moved (now symlinked/refreshed)
• Minor copy tweaks
• Reworked SL status to use 1000B = 1MB, 1024B = MiB for Leopard and earlier.
• Fixed crontab escaping if user has tcsh as their default shell
• Fixed issues with explicit Spotlight disable/enable under 10.5+

If you currently have SuperDuper!, you'll be notified of the update the next time you fire it up. If you don't have it, get it.

Thanks to Scott for the tip!

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly Mac troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about backing up photos, removing a Boot Camp partition, Snow Leopard and Windows 7, Bluetooth menus, iPhone search results and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions 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.

Han asks:

What is the best way to archive photos without using iPhoto? I have about 100 GB of original photos and I have been saving them on my NetGear ReadyNAS Duo. Sometimes I leave the photos in the folder and just copy it to the NAS or sometimes zip them before I put it in the NAS. What I am worried about is if I zip the folder and somehow the zip file itself gets corrupted, is it harder to recover them? Is it better to just not zip and leave it as a folder then copy it to the NAS?

Because photos are pretty important and almost impossible to recreate I take my photo workflow and backup seriously. First, I never import photos directly into iPhoto and instead, using a card reader, copy the files to a folder I have labeled specifically for these photos which resides in my main "Photography" folder.

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!

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.