Computer^News^FAQ: Aple

Migrate Time Machine backup to new Mac in Lion

8:34:00 PM

While Time Machine gained a couple new features in Lion, I've just stumbled across a new piece of functionality in Apple's backup software that will have a lot of users cheering: You can now use a previous Time Machine disk with a new computer and inherit the entire backup history of the older machine. And it doesn't even require a flux capacitor.

Given Apple's attempt with Time Machine to make backups painless, the migration process is pretty easy: Plug your old Time Machine drive into a new computer and open the Time Machine preference pane in System Preferences. Lion will remind you that you haven't selected a backup drive and will present a dialog box with a button to open Time Machine Preferences as well as a new option: Use Previous Disk. Clicking on that will provide you with a list of mounted drives that contain Time Machine backups.

Once you've selected the older Time Machine drive and told your Mac to backup, you'll be given another choice: Create an entirely new backup or inherit the backup history of the old drive. In the latter case, your old computer's Time Machine backup will be migrated to work with the new computer. Be warned, though—as Lion points out, time travel is a tricky business: If you migrate the Time Machine backup to work with your new computer, you won't be able to use it with the older computer.

This is a far, far better state of affairs than existed under Leopard and Snow Leopard. Previously, if you bought a new Mac, you could migrate data from your Time Machine backup while setting up your new computer, but after that, all those existing backups wouldn't be recognized by the Time Machine interface. Which meant either setting up a new set of backups running in parallel, or tossing that drive into a drawer and setting up a fresh Time Machine drive. (There were some methods for migrating a Time Machine backup, but it was an iffy proposition that required mucking about in the Terminal—and even then, it wasn't a sure thing.)

Now Mac users can theoretically maintain a continuous set of backups across multiple computers' lifetimes, which does a lot towards making sure that your old data never gets lost.

AirDrop

How to encrypt an external hard drive in Lion

8:26:00 PM

FileVault 2 not only encrypts your Mac’s internal drive, but it can also encrypt external drives connected via USB and FireWire (and we suspect you’ll be able to encrypt external drives connected via Thunderbolt, but Apple’s documentation doesn’t specify this). However, external drives must be formatted using HFS+. If you have an external drive you want to use with both Windows and a Mac, you have to use the FAT file format, and you can’t encrypt it.

To encrypt your external drive, you need to use Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) to reformat it. You can’t encrypt a drive that has data on it—that’s a major drawback if you have an existing hard drive with a ton of data and you want it encrypted. If you want to keep the data, you need to back it up and then copy it back to the drive after the reformatting.

One major caveat: During our testing, encrypted external hard drives could only be used on other Macs running Lion, and not with older versions of OS X. When we connected a drive encrypted using Lion’s Disk Utility to a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard, a message appeared, stating that the drive required OS X 10.7.

Disk Utility

To encrypt an external drive, connect it to your Mac, wait until it mounts on your desktop after you turn it on, and launch Disk Utility. You’ll see a left column that lists the storage devices on your Mac. The first device is your internal drive. Your external drives should follow. Select the drive you want to encrypt. Then click on the Erase tab in the section to the right.

In the Format pop-up menu, you’ll see two new disk formats available to you, in addition to the standard Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled), MS-DOS (FAT), and ExFAT. The two new formats are Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted), and Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted).

In most cases, you should pick Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted). The other encrypted Mac format lets you give files the same names but with different letter case treatment. (For example, both files named 2011taxes.numbers and 2011Taxes.numbers can exist in the same folder.) You also need to provide a name. Click Erase.

Set a password

A window will appear, confirming that you want to create an encrypted volume. If so, you need to enter a password. You need to enter this password any time you mount the drive, so be sure to memorize it.

Once you enter and confirm the password, click Erase. This will start the formatting process, which will take several minutes. If you don’t want to encrypt the drive, click Cancel.

Enter password

Once the drive is formatted, you’ll need to enter a password to access it. Your files will be automatically encrypted and decrypted. If you dismount the drive, you’ll need to enter the password when you try to mount it again on your desktop. If you enter the wrong password or don’t enter one, you can’t access the data.

At the password-entry window, you have the option to save your password in your keychain. This will allow your drive to mount without needing your password for that particular Mac that’s storing your keychain. If you try to attach the encrypted drive to, say, your friend’s Mac, which doesn’t have your keychain information, you’ll need to enter a password to access the drive.

AirDrop

How AirDrop makes file-sharing simple

8:13:00 PM

Moving a file from one computer to another remains as big a pain today as it was decades ago when network file-sharing first became common. To move a file from Computer A (your MacBook Pro, say) to Computer B (a colleague’s or family member’s Mac mini, for instance), you have to ensure both machines are on the same network or visible to each other over the Internet. Then you start up File Sharing in the Sharing preference pane, and make sure the other person has the correct permissions to access the folder or volume containing the file. Then, on the other machine, that person (it could be you) selects the networked file server, enters login credentials, and navigates to the file to copy it.

Lion’s AirDrop feature is supposed to cut through all that nonsense and make moving one or more files between two computers a breeze. You just open the AirDrop window (click its name in the sidebar of any Finder window), and drag files onto the icon of a nearby user (who also has the AirDrop window open). They agree to accept the files, and—voilà!—the transfer happens.

But how does AirDrop accomplish this apparently seamless magic? By taking advantage of a not-so-new bit of Wi-Fi technology that allows computers and other devices to connect to one another via peer-to-peer networking. Computers connecting via AirDrop don’t have to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network. They don’t require an ad hoc network or software base station. AirDrop bypasses all that.

The right chips

What AirDrop does require is a Mac with one of the newer Wi-Fi chips—specifically, those that support the Wi-Fi Direct networking system (or similar technology that predates its standardization). Wi-Fi Direct has been around in industry-approved form since 2009. It enables devices to establish simple peer-to-peer connections; at the same time, it supports strong WPA2 encryption. It also allows devices to advertise their available services to other pieces of hardware. For instance, a printer with Wi-Fi Direct could broadcast the fact that it was a printer—even its model number for the purposes of loading a driver—while a cell phone might tell nearby devices that it can transfer files and be used as a relay to access the Internet.

Most popular Wi-Fi chipsets—including some that Apple has used for years—support Wi-Fi Direct. But even though Apple and Microsoft sit on the board of the Wi-Fi Alliance, which developed the underlying technical standards and certification regime, support in operating systems has been lacking. You can’t find it in Windows 7 or Lion, nor in any mobile operating system. For AirDrop, Apple is using just a subset of Wi-Fi Direct’s features; strictly speaking, AirDrop isn’t actually compatible with the standard.

Apple began to include compatible Wi-Fi chips in some of its Macs three years ago; but as recently as a year ago, some Mac models still didn’t have them. Unless your Mac has the correct Atheros or Broadcom chip, you can’t use AirDrop. Apple’s AirDrop troubleshooting page lists the Macs that support the technology:

o MacBook Pro (Late 2008 or newer, but not 17-inch Late 2008)

o MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer)

o MacBook (Late 2008 or newer, but not white MacBook Late 2008)

o iMac (Early 2009 or newer)

o Mac Mini (Mid 2010 or newer)

o Mac Pro (Early 2009 with AirPort Extreme card, or Mid 2010)

Of my five home and work Macs, only two have the right chips, even though they all meet Lion’s other hardware requirements.

The hit-or-miss availability of AirDrop has made some Mac owners mad, and they’ve been venting their spleen in online forums and news stories. People rightly complain when a marquee feature of a new OS isn’t available uniformly. Some have wondered why Apple didn’t make AirDrop available over older Wi-Fi or on Ethernet connections. The answer is that AirDrop isn’t based on standard networking technologies; it’s peer-to-peer. Apple would certainly have made more friends by adopting the approach of DropCopy (, free for one to three computers), which runs on standard network connections or over Bonjour.

Despite its shortcomings, I see AirDrop as a sign of things to come. As more new Macs are sold and old ones die or are put out to pasture, more and more machines will support AirDrop. As modern networking chips become more common, Apple (and others) could implement Wi-Fi Direct fully, which would make a host of common networking tasks simpler. AirDrop (or Wi-Fi Direct) could also find its way into iOS and other mobile operating systems. However it happens, we’re likely to find AirDrop-style peer-to-peer hookups more routine and more consistently available as time goes on.

Aple

Useful tips for working with OS X Lion’s Launchpad

6:17:00 PM

Launchpad, the new app launcher in Mac OS X Lion, can be useful for hunting down apps you don’t use very often. However, sometimes it can feel bloated and difficult to navigate. Here are a few tips to make Launchpad a bit easier to work with.

Skip the click-and-hold

Mac App Store apps that are in your Launchpad can be moved by clicking and holding their icons, and deleted then clicking the ‘x’ that appears in the corner of each icon. It’s possible to delete and move them without waiting for that delay, though. Instead of clicking and holding an icon, simply hold the Option key on the keyboard. The icons will start to wiggle instantly, and you’ll be able to delete and move the apps.

You can also move the icons without them being in the ‘editing mode’. You can move them around simply by clicking or tapping and dragging; the icons don’t have to be wiggling to be moved.

Clear Launchpad and start again

If your Launchpad is anything like mine, it has all sorts of applications listed that you’d rather not see, such as Adobe help apps, or uninstallers. If you’d like to only have Launchpad show the apps you actually use, you can clear Launchpad completely and add the apps manually. It may be time consuming to add all the apps again, but it should stop Launchpad feeling so bloated.

1. First off, make a backup of the current Launchpad database. That way, if something goes wrong, you can restore Launchpad back to how it was. To do this, open [Your username] > Library > Application Support > Dock and make a copy of the file that’s in there. In order to get to the Library folder, you may have to use the Finder’s Go menu with the option key held down, since Lion hides it by default.

2. Now open up Terminal from Applications > Utilities. Once it’s open, paste the following command:

1	sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; \
2	DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;" \

3	&& killall Dock

4. Launchpad should now be empty. You can add apps back in by dragging them from the Applications folder onto the Launchpad icon.

If you’d like to restore Launchpad to how it was when you first installed Lion, simply delete the file you made a copy of from the Application Support > Dock folder. Next time you launch Launchpad, it should be back to normal.

Hide certain apps

If you’d rather not delete everything from Launchpad, or you aren’t comfortable using the Terminal, there is a preference pane you can download which allows you to select certain apps to hide from Launchpad. It’s called Launchpad-Control, and can be downloaded fromthis website.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the preference pane, you can find it under “Other” in System Preferences. In the Launchpad-Control pane, you’ll find a list of apps that are currently in Launchpad. You can uncheck the box next to an app’s name to hide it from Launchpad. Click apply, and you’ll briefly see the Dock disappear. Once it returns, open Launchpad and the apps you unchecked will no longer appear there.

Set up a Launchpad keyboard shortcut

Unless you bought a Mac after Lion was released, your keyboard probably doesn’t have a shortcut key for opening Launchpad. It’s very easy to set one up using System Preferences.

1. Open System Preferences and open the Keyboard preference pane. In there, select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.

2. From the source list on the left, select Launchpad & Dock. Now find Show Launchpad from the list on the right.

3. Double-click on the right hand side of the entry for Show Launchpad. A small text field should appear. Now type the shortcut you’d like to use for showing Launchpad. You can now use that shortcut to show and hide Launchpad using your keyboard.

Especially f you don’t like having Launchpad in the Dock, this makes it much easier to open it. You could even remap the Dashboard key to open Launchpad, if you wish.

Do you know of any other time-saving or organizational tips for Launchpad? Tell us below in the comments.

Aple

How to set up iTunes Home Sharing on the iPhone 4

6:05:00 PM

Aple

How to transfer iPod music to Mac

5:59:00 PM

Computer^News^FAQ

Migrate Time Machine backup to new Mac in Lion