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Bouncing Back from Disaster – How to Restore from Your Backup.

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 | Author:

Here at the OWC Blog, we’ve posted a lot of advice about backing up your data over the years. However, there’s one thing we’ve never explicitly talked about: how to restore your system from that backup if disaster strikes.

Now, I can hear half of you out there saying, “Pfft! You simply replace the drive and reverse the backup process so you’re writing to the drive you just replaced.” To an extent, that’s true, provided you have a bootable backup and you’re 100% sure there’s nothing corrupted with the system.

However, if you don’t have a bootable backup (e.g., you’re backing up via Time machine) you can’t simply “copy it all back.” Furthermore, installing a new boot drive provides an excellent opportunity to clear out some of the “junk” that’s probably accumulated in your drive over the years. For those reasons, we recommend the “Fresh Install and Migrate” method when upgrading/replacing your system drive, which works for both bootable clones and Time Machine backups. Article Continues…

Category: Tech Tips

Apple Wireless Mouse Misbehaving?

Thursday, April 11th, 2013 | Author:

Does your Apple Magic Mouse jitter, slow-down, have connection issues, or just have an odd inconsistent performance. If so there’s an easy to install fix that alleviates those problems almost all of the time… change the batteries.

Yep, the Apple Magic Mouse, and Trackpad for that matter, appear to be a bit finicky when it comes to power. I’ve even experienced issues where using two different types of batteries cause issues, or two batteries at two different charge levels – which can happen a lot if you’re into using rechargeable batteries like I am.

In any case, don’t fret my Mac friends, a simple battery swap out can save the day.

What’s that? You’re mouseless or trackpadless? See our collection of mice, or get a a nifty new trackpad.

Happy mousing.

Category: Tech Tips

An Easy Way to Clear Out Unused iOS Apps from iTunes 11.

Monday, April 1st, 2013 | Author:

Over the years, I’ve managed to amass a large amount of apps for my iOS devices. Some of them are really good and I use them daily. Others, I wind up being less-than-enamored with, and quickly remove them. This is all well and good; well over 90% of the stuff on my iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone I got for free, so I have no problem deleting it.

The problem is, even though I have deleted these apps from my devices, the odds are that I originally downloaded them via iTunes (or wound up syncing them there), and they still reside in my library. I took a look recently, and realized I had well over 750 of apps, most of which I wasn’t using. That’s a lot of space that could be used for more important things.

The most obvious solution for this would be to simply go through my iTunes library and simply delete the apps I don’t use. This would be fine, except that I have three iOS devices, each with apps that aren’t on the other ones. It would be a nightmare of cross referencing over 750 apps to see which ones were used and which ones weren’t. As the popular meme goes, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Fortunately, there’s a simpler solution, using the built-in tools in iTunes 11. Article Continues…

Category: Tech Tips

OS X 10.8.3 Now Offers Fusion Drive Possibilities For Non-Fusion Drive Equipped Macs

Monday, March 25th, 2013 | Author: , and

We’ve been waiting and waiting for Apple to release the next version of OS X Mountain Lion in hopes that the next full version would have all the necessary components to setup a Fusion drive on any Mac capable of installing a hard drive and SSD together. A little over a week ago, Apple released OS X version 10.8.3 and, with one small caveat, our hopes were fulfilled.

The Profusion Of Fusion Confusion

But before we get to showing you exactly how to setup your own DIY Fusion drive, I’d like to dispel some mis-information that has been floating around the web. Up until now, most of the reports you’ve read about creating your own DIY Fusion drive on a machine have been incomplete. There have been many tutorials on how to create a Core Storage volume that have been labeled as “how to create a Fusion drive”. They are two similar, yet different drive configurations. I’ve addressed a lot of this information in comments on the OWC Blog, but figure it would be a good idea to review and further explain what a Fusion drive actually is as opposed to a Core Storage volume. Article Continues…

Category: Tech Tips

Tech Tip: Resetting Your Password In OS X 10.7 Or Later

Friday, March 15th, 2013 | Author:

Forget that new super secure password you just created?

Breathe easy, there is a simple fix. In OS X versions 10.6 and earlier we would just boot to the installation disk, go to Utilities, and open the Reset Password application. In 10.7 and 10.8 Apple has removed this option from the menu, however there is an alternative way to get to it.

In order to get to the Reset Password application in 10.7 or 10.8 we will need to boot to the recovery partition by holding down the “Option” key at startup. Article Continues…

Category: Tech Tips