backups

A computer crash can be devastating, especially when you lose all of your photos. I trust that if you are a Mac user, you are performing regular Time Machine backups, which saves a snapshot of your entire hard drive and stores it on an external drive. For the extra cautious, you can also save a copy of your iPhoto library to an external hard drive or a disc (because who knows--your Time Machine drive might fail one day). Here's how in iPhoto '11:… Read more

When was the last time you backed up your hosted WordPress site? Your host likely backs up the entire server on a regular basis, but it's a good idea to keep your own local backups, just in case.

To properly back up your WordPress site, you need to back up all your WordPress files and your database. Here's how to manually back up your hosted WordPress site:

Step 1: Using an FTP program like FileZilla, connect to your blog host (GoDaddy, BlueHost, DreamHost, etc.) with your FTP username and password.

Step 2: After establishing a connection, … Read more

In a perfect world, you wouldn't be concerned about safety when you use your computer. Short of that, you just want to feel confident your PC is virus-free, protected from the prospect of future infections, and easy to recover if something goes wrong. Three things that will help ease your mind are a manual malware scan, an easy-to-restore copy of your hard drive, and a sandbox for your browser to run in.

Run your system through a second-opinion virus scanner Even the best real-time antivirus scanners miss a small percentage of malware. A second scan with a different virus … Read more

UPDATE June 20, 2011: This offer has now ended.

It's Friday again and we have yet another offer for our CNET readers. Trend Micro is typically well-known for its antivirus and Internet security software, but with cloud backup services getting ever so popular, the company wants to get in on the cloud action too. There are several other solutions out there, but SafeSync has a strong security background of Trend Micro backing it up. Traveling? No problem. Access your music, movies, photos, or documents away from home and on your mobile devices. SafeSync keeps your files synchronized and up-to-date … Read more

The introduction of the iCloud at today's WWDC keynote symbolizes Apple's shift to cloud-based backups, syncing, and moving files seamlessly among all your devices, whether you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Mac, or PC. Just like Google's offerings (Doc and Calendar syncing, and Picasa, as examples), iCloud lets you sync media, apps, music, documents, calendars, and more automatically. It's important to note that Android has had the download and sync features since February of this year.

As usual at Apple's keynote events, Steve Jobs was not the only person on the stage demonstrating the latest and greatest from Apple. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, came up to talk about multitouch gestures on the Mac, for example. Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Apple software, then came up to demo some of the new features of full-screen apps. But when it was time to talk about iCloud, it was Steve Jobs who did the talking. In other words, however you feel about iCloud, it seemed to be the "main event" that Apple seemed to be most excited about.… Read more

Supply of Apple's Time Capsule hardware is reportedly becoming scarce in the days ahead of the company's Worldwide Developers Conference, a sign that a new version of the product could be just around the corner.

Time Capsule, which was released at the beginning of 2008, combines a wireless router with a hard drive, giving users a way to store files on the device. It's also tied to Apple's built-in Time Machine backup software, which made its debut as a part of Leopard. That software is able to tap into the Time Capsule to wirelessly store backups … Read more

When discussing options for backing up or migrating data to new Macs, we frequently mention cloning as a way to do this. While Time Machine and similar backup schemes can create fully restorable backups of your system, the backups themselves are not bootable, so in order to use them as such you must restore them to an available hard-drive partition, which can take a number of hours to complete. Clones, on the other hand, do allow for immediate booting to the backup, and therefore are quite appealing as an option.

Cloning is when you basically make a mirror copy of … Read more

When Apple introduced iTools (which later became .Mac and finally MobileMe), the package included an option to back up files to your online iDisk. Apple's Backup utility could transfer user-defined batches of files to the iDisk as well as to local drives and optical discs. Backing up data online so you could access files from anywhere was appealing; however, the option of automatic backups to online storage has never really taken off. One big reason for this is Apple's backup option for OS X has switched from Backup and similar utilities to Time Machine, which is designed as … Read more

In yesterday's article on protecting your Mac from recent malware developments in the Mac community, I mentioned briefly to exclude specific download folders from your Time Machine backups or other backup options to prevent any downloaded malware installers from being retained in a backup. In response to this article, MacFixIt reader "Harry" wrote in wondering what to do if malware or other unwanted items do get backed up to Time Machine.

Time Machine runs every hour, so if you have installed the recent malware or another unwanted item and your backup routine has run, then it is … Read more