Despite constant encouragement these days to push our valuable data into "the cloud", there is still a genuine need for offline backups. Since its introduction in OS X Leopard, Apple has improved the Time Machine drastically. Within OS X Mavericks, Mac users can not only enjoy encryption and improved notification support but also backup disk rotation. This means that you can now choose multiple drives for Time Machine to use, and it's easy to set up!
To add extra drives to your Time Machine backup routine, do this:
• Open System Preferences from the Apple menu and click "Time Machine"
• Click "Select Disk..."
• Choose the volume you want to add to your backup routine, then click "Use Disk"
• Click "Use Both" to add the new drive to your backup schedule.
Your Mac will rotate its backup schedule to include all of the volumes you add to Time Machine, which is great because that means you can easily have separate backups at work and home simply by keeping different hard drives at each location. It's also great for automatically backing up to more than one Time Machine volume at the same location. For example, you can backup to a Time Capsule on your own network, and have a second backup on a hard drive connected directly to your Mac.
Time Machine will show you files from the volume it most recently used for backing up content. If you need to see files from a different backup location, just press the Option (Alt) key and choose "Browse Other Backup Disks..." from the Time Machine menu in the menu bar.
• Close unused document windows. If you’re not actively using an image file, close it. Each open file can take up a significant amount of memory, which can quickly lead to slow downs.
• Reduce an images resolution. Working with higher resolution images and files uses more resources. If you’re going to be saving a relatively low quality version of an image anyway, reduce the image resolution to a tolerable level to gain a nice speed boost.
• Purge history and clipboard. Edit > Purge > All. The history feature of Photoshop is useful but it takes up a lot of memory. If you’re not using it, purging the contents of history and clipboard frees up resources.
• Turn off animated zoom. Preferences > General > Animated Zoom > Uncheck.
• Turn off flick panning. Preferences > General > Enabled Flick Panning > Uncheck.
• Set drawing mode to Basic. Preferences > Performance > Graphics Processor Settings > Advanced Settings > Drawing Mode > Basic.
• Disable anti-aliasing on guides and paths. Preferences > Performance > Graphics Processor Settings > Advanced Settings > Anti-alias Guides and Paths > Uncheck.
• Adjust Photoshops memory use. Preferences > Performance > Memory Usage (adjust this based on your physical memory capacity and individual needs, a higher percentage is better).
• Turn off image previews. Preferences > File Handling > File Saving Options > Image Previews > Never Save.
• Use less Video RAM for 3D stuff. Preferences > 3D > Available VRAM for 3D > 30%, this is particularly useful for anyone using a computer with a video card that shares VRAM with primary RAM, such as some MacBook, MacBook Air, and Mac Mini models.
• Watch the efficiency indicator. At the bottom of any open Photoshop window you’ll see an “efficiency” gauge, if this falls below 100% that means you are using the scratch disk (hard drive) for memory and Photoshop will become slower. Solve this by allocating more RAM or by having less open windows.
Make sure you completely quit Photoshop and restart it and you should see a significant difference in performance.
Your Mac stores certain settings in a special memory area even if it is turned off. On Intel-based Macs, this is stored in memory known as NVRAM, on PowerPC-based Macs, this is stored in memory known as PRAM. Information stored in NVRAM or PRAM may include speaker volume, screen resolution and startup disk selection. You may need to reset the NVRAM or PRAM if you experience issues related to these functions.
For example, if your Mac starts up from a startup disk other than the one you've specified in Startup Disk preferences, or if a "question mark" icon appears briefly when your Mac starts up, resetting NVRAM or PRAM may help.
• Shut down the computer.
• Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option (Alt), P and R.
• Turn on the computer.
• Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys (you must press this key combination before the gray screen appears).
• Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time, then release the keys.
After resetting NVRAM or PRAM you may need to reconfigure your settings for speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information. If issues persist, your Mac's logic board battery (not a portable Mac's rechargeable battery) may need to be replaced. The logic board battery helps retain NVRAM/PRAM settings when your computer is shut down. You can take your Mac to a Mac Genius or Apple Authorized Service Provider to replace the battery on the logic board.
In some situations, you may need to reset your computer's System Management Controller (SMC). Learn how to identify these conditions and reset the SMC.
Apple’s Mail application is one of the best email clients around for OS X. Why is it so good? Well, it is free, comes with every Mac and supports almost all types of email accounts! That said, it can always be improved a little. In particular you might notice that it slows down over time, especially if you have large mailboxes and lots of contacts so let’s have a look at how we can speed it up a bit.
The first, and most obvious thing, is to slim down your mailboxes a bit. Create a new folder in Mail and move all your old emails into that folder (or use the Archive function if you have a Gmail account. This way Mail only has to load the most recent emails when it launches and instead of having to synchronise a list of over 20 000 emails with the server it only has to deal with 500 or so, saving your precious bandwidth if you are on a mobile connection.
It is also a good idea to rebuild Mail’s Envelope Index now and then. Mail application uses the (SQLite) Envelope Index database to index and search messages. By rebuilding this database, issues concerning messages that appear incomplete or are missing can be corrected. This feature may also improve Mail's performance. Just launch Cocktail, go to System > Databases and click on the Rebuild button.
You can also use Cocktail to clear Mail downloads. When you receive attachments to e-mail messages, the files are stored with your messages at first. But if you double-click an attachment to view it, Mail stores a copy in a folder on your hard drive. You may have dozens of files there occupying a huge amount of space. You can generally delete these without worry. If you still have the original messages, the attachments are part of those messages. All you have to do is to make sure that the “Mail downloads” option in Cocktail > Preferences > Caches > Internet is enabled next time you use Cocktail to clear Internet caches.
Another housekeeping tip is to clean your previous recipients list. Mail stores a list of everyone you’ve ever sent a message to so that it can suggest their email addresses when you are writing a new email. The problem is that many of these recipients are people you only emailed once, or addresses which have changed so the list can become full of out of date and irrelevant addresses. Select Previous Recipients from the Window menu in Mail to clean up the list.
Finally, if you are using Mail to read RSS feeds it might be a good idea to go through your subscriptions and deleting the ones you no longer read as Mail essentially treats an RSS subscription as a mailbox. This means that as the number of posts increases Mail will slow down, so keep an eye on your feeds!
How many times have you typed something to discover the last two characters are in the wrong order? You know, when “the” turns into “teh” and “because” into “becuase”, a fairly common general mistype.
Apparently it happens often enough for there to be an individual keyboard shortcut to instantly swap the last two typed characters, and that keyboard shortcut is Control+T.