Utilities, Part 3

For our April 15, 2025, meeting, we continued to look at utilities, and focused in particular on Time Machine, which we were supposed to cover in March but somehow forgot. Time Machine is easily the most useful Macintosh utility, yet a surprising number of users don’t use it. Time Machine isn’t even a “new” thing, having been included in every version of macOS since October 2007, when it was bundled with Mac OS X 10.5.

Let us repeat: Time Machine is the most useful Macintosh utility.

We looked at other stuff, as well. Some of us probably filed our taxes on time, too.

Video recording of the meeting

Because someone forgot to turn on recording at the start, we missed the start of the meeting. Sigh.

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Transcript of the meeting

We had an internet outage in the middle of the meeting, and the transcript is in two parts.

Part 1

18:52:29 So that we actually have some record of what we've been talking about.
18:52:36 I should have a checklist of things that Lawrence is going to forget and then go down that check.
18:52:42 Do you realize that almost every, well, it's required on a plane, the pilot has to go through a written checklist every time. They can't do it from memory. They have to go through the written checklist.
18:52:52 Check everything off. For submarines, they have to go through a written checklist.
18:52:59 I'm beginning sometimes to think maybe we should do this for things like cars and You know, other technology we use.
18:53:09 Washing machines. I recently, I was washing recently wash the clothes. I left the house two days later. I looked in the washing machine and There are slightly damp clothes in the washing machine because I didn't go to step two of drying them.
18:53:26 I should have a checklist. What was the question again?
18:53:31 It was about archiving photos in Amazon. If you have Amazon Prime, they offer a good deal for a lot of online storage for photos.
18:53:43 Yes, although they recently changed it so that they recently changed it so If you upload video, video counts against your storage limit and you run out of your storage much faster. But in terms of In terms of online storage for photos, it's actually a good deal. All you have to do is be a Prime member. You don't have to do it.
18:54:03 Anything separately. Google has storage of photos, but Google downsized the image. It's a fairly decent size what they put up there, but they downsized the image.
18:54:17 And Amazon does not do that, which is kind of cool.
18:54:21 If you're a Prime member, yeah, go for it. The good news, bad news about Amazon Prime is that they used to have a script that would run on the Mac that would back up those things for you. So it would just you'd say anything that's in this folder, back it up to amazon prime
18:54:41 That script hasn't worked for a couple of years. So you might have to do things manually. The script It… Amazon's software is not all that great.
18:54:55 And that includes the Kindle. There are lots of things I like about the Kindle, but the software is not one of them. It's really creaky.
18:55:04 You can do a lot more with Kindle on a Mac than you can with Kindle on a Kindle.
18:55:08 Which is hilarious. So aside from the limitations of this software doing it automatically I have no qualms at all about Amazon photos. I do have some qualms about security though.
18:55:30 Yeah.
18:55:26 Amazon, when it goes out and buys other companies, like I have… a nest protect
18:55:38 Smoke detector system And I have a couple of Nest cameras and so on and so forth.
18:55:44 Amazon bought Nest several years ago and Amazon recently forced me to change my username and password from a Nest username and password to an Amazon username and password.
18:55:59 And I don't like that. I use Amazon's username and password for buying things from Amazon.
18:56:06 But now that same Amazon password also runs my security system.
18:56:11 I don't really necessarily want something that I use to buy things to be used for my security system.
18:56:18 Yeah.
18:56:18 And the same applies for photographs, for example. You… You went to share photos with somebody over at Amazon Photos. You can do that. But the idea that you're doing that from an account that also can be used for spending money
18:56:36 Does not really appeal to me. My Amazon password is quite complex, so I'm not too worried about it, but a lot of people have very simple passwords And a lot of people reuse passwords. So if you reuse the same password for Amazon that you do for Google, that you use for
18:56:55 Free points after gas station, there's a good chance it'll get compromised.
18:56:59 And at that point, they can take over your Google account, your Amazon account, your gas station account, a bunch of other things.
18:57:05 So I'm not so wild about that aspect. But again, if you're an Amazon Prime user, there's no reason not to use it.
18:57:13 I use it.
18:57:18 Do you have recommendations for a really good online Not expensive.
18:57:25 Kind of place to store photos just So it would be off-site.
18:57:32 I don't. I use… I use Apple Photos and I have that two terabyte plan.
18:57:41 People say, oh, it's expensive. Not really. If you went out and bought a hard drive It would… it would cost more than the cost more than Apple two terabyte plan and for through two terabytes, you can stick a lot of photos up there
18:57:58 I use Amazon photos because, again, I have a Prime account, so why not? I also have a backup, a commercial backup that I use called, what is it called?
18:58:11 I am… Talking during… I'm going to be, what is it called?
18:58:20 Backblaze, which I'm going to mention when I get to the presentation.
18:58:25 For storing stuff. I like things like shutterfly and so on and so forth in theory because Shutterfly is designed to not only Destroy your photos, but display the photos. But the problem is I have over 100,000 photos and I certainly can't afford
18:58:42 To use them. So I'm a fan of having things off-site And for that, among other things, I recommend archival copies, which I will also explain during the presentation today.
18:58:56 Oh, good. Thank you. Okay.
18:59:00 I believe I have successfully activated my microphone. Is that correct?
18:59:06 Yes.
18:59:07 All right. I wanted to make a comment about what was talked about before about the um ability to to copy
18:59:22 Called.
18:59:27 And I use Super Duper and and have a a bootable that I can, because of the backup on super duper i can reproduce everything that is on my computer, including the applications.
18:59:49 But Super Duper is not a backup program super duper is basically a disk imager which is a It's a whole different animal. The other problem with super duper is that Super Duper does not work with Apple Silicon machines.
19:00:07 And the people at Super Duper say they probably won't be able to fix that.
19:00:11 What do you mean by a silicon machine?
19:00:16 Everything in Apple makes today uses an Apple Silicon processor. It's their own processor rather than the Intel processes that they used in the past. And Super Duper doesn't work with it. And the producer of Super Duper says they can't fix that.
19:00:32 It has to do with the security that Apple has built into Apple Silicon and into the most recent operating system.
19:00:41 That the operating system looks at what's super is trying to do and says, nah.
19:00:46 Can't do that because what super duper does does violate the Apple security protocol.
19:00:56 So it doesn't work anymore.
19:00:58 That explains it because I'm still on an older operating system and an older machine and I'm still functioning with it.
19:01:07 But…
19:01:08 But there were also there was a word in there that I used about what super duper does. It breaks Apple's security model.
19:01:16 So if you're using Super Duper, your machine is less secure.
19:01:21 Okay. Thank you.
19:01:26 And it is seven o'clock, so I'm going to turn it over to our president, who I saw there a second ago.
19:01:32 And she seems to have vanished. There you are.
19:01:35 I'm here. Peekaboo. Good evening, everybody.
19:01:42 I don't have a lot to say. Which is unusual because I usually have a lot to say.
19:01:49 But not now. We have a little bit of a treasury report.
19:01:55 And that is about all. Yeah.
19:02:00 I don't see anybody new, right? Anybody missing anybody?
19:02:08 Okay. Well, we did have another due payment somebody paid uh You'll be deuce again.
19:02:18 We also had some expenses of 348 no 397.03 which for the world press is 34803.
19:02:30 And then for the discussion board, it's another $49. That's a total then of $397.03.
19:02:41 And the balance right now in our account is $2,143.60.
19:02:51 Okay. Something I want people to think about.
19:02:57 Is that eventually I went to have an in-person meeting And the last time we had one, it was during a Saturday afternoon.
19:03:09 And the reason why Saturday afternoon is nice is that most people have Saturdays off.
19:03:13 And a Saturday afternoon, you don't have to drive around in the night and so on and so forth so People like that idea. One limitation that we've found is finding somebody who has a projection system that we can use.
19:03:26 And I want you to entertain the thought of us possibly buying a a small portable projector that we could use.
19:03:36 Because it would give us much more flexibility in picking somebody to use as well.
19:03:43 As a… as a venue for a venue having a meeting. I don't want a discussion now. I want you to just think about that.
19:03:55 The library is coming along nicely. We used to meet at the library and they think that they're going to open sometime this late summer or fall.
19:04:07 I was in there three days ago. And I asked them if they had a timeline and they smiled at me.
19:04:14 And that was the response. That's a good response, but it's not terribly informative.
19:04:24 Anything else before the presentation?
19:04:29 Okay, I'm going to do a little show and tell first.
19:04:32 And the show and tell. Is I'm going to show you some storage drives.
19:04:38 This is a… I don't know what they call it. I don't know if this is considered two inch drive or whatever, 1.8 inch drive. This is a hard drive that was taken out of a Windows laptop.
19:04:50 It's made by Samsung. And I can tell from the uh security code on it that it was made in December of 2007.
19:05:02 It's a 160 gig drive. My first drive that i ever owned.
19:05:15 Was physically twice the size of this. It was the same physical dimensions here, but it was twice as thick.
19:05:20 And that was called a, and actually it was slightly larger too. It was a five and a quarter inch drive so it was about In terms of cubic space it was about three times what this is and it was about three times
19:05:33 Three times as heavy. And it was heavy and it was a 10 gigabyte drive.
19:05:40 Now, just to explain. No, it was a 10 megabyte drive.
19:05:45 10 megabyte drive and to explain If I take a picture with my Apple 16 Pro Max.
19:05:53 The photograph alone is 40 megabytes.
19:05:59 So it would have taken a lot of these drives to store just one photograph with my iPhone.
19:06:07 We don't have drives that small anymore. This one, which is not working, which is why it's got a big X on it, is a one terabyte drive.
19:06:15 And this is a three and a half inch drive. A three and a half inch drive is standard for hard drives in desktop computers today.
19:06:22 And it's one terabyte drive. There are drives that have the same form factor as this. So there's the same physical shape now.
19:06:30 They go up to 22 terabytes. 22 terabytes.
19:06:37 One terabyte is a thousand gigabytes.
19:06:41 So 22. Terabytes is 22 thousand gigabytes.
19:06:48 Which is a lot. That's a three and a half inch drive.
19:06:54 And if you look at it compared to this laptop drive, the laptop drive is much smaller.
19:07:00 And there are laptop drives that are even smaller than this. They're about the size of a quarter.
19:07:09 This is a small laptop drive inside of a case and its case is supposed to be Nice little bumper thing so that you can accidentally drop it. Not that I would, but if I did theoretically it's It's contained.
19:07:26 And the nice thing about this This drive… uses up enough power that whatever it's plugged into has to be plugged into a wall socket.
19:07:38 This thing plugs into your computer using a USB drive. So it uses your computer as the power source and you don't have to have a separate power come out of it. It's designed to be used with a laptop or with a desktop machine.
19:07:52 And this is I think two terabytes.
19:07:58 I don't remember. Been a while. And this is a two terabyte drive They're essentially the same size drive, but you'll notice that this one's much, much thinner.
19:08:11 It's made by Who makes it? I think this was made by Lassie.
19:08:18 And it's called a Porsche Design Drive, the same Porsche design group that designs race cars designed this case. That's the only thing they designed. The insides are just another Simon Singer or Toshiba or something dry.
19:08:32 If you go into if you go into Well, one more thing I want to show you.
19:08:39 My favorite solid state drive This is made by OMC, which stands for the Otherworld of Computing, and they specialize in Mac peripherals.
19:08:49 And again, it's powered by whatever that's plugged into. The nice thing about this one is that it can be set up as a boot drive. A boot drive means I can actually boot a Mac off of this if I set it up correctly.
19:09:03 And that was important because I was doing diagnostics and I wanted to be able to boot something that was sick and find out how it was working.
19:09:13 If you go into if you go into Costco. Costco usually has in their computer section stacks of backup drives, things like this.
19:09:25 They usually have a three and a half inch drive inside of them. Some of them be about twice as thick as this.
19:09:31 And those still have three and a half inch drives and they just have two of them in there.
19:09:37 And they use cheap, inexpensive drives. They don't use top of the line and they sell them really cheap.
19:09:42 They're great for backup drives because they're great because they're not your primary drive that you use all the time. They're a backup drive.
19:09:49 And the backup drive doesn't have to be prime stuff, just like the The old backup pants that you use for going out and doing gardening don't have to be the nice ones that you wear to church.
19:10:01 Backup is for a particular duty. And that duty doesn't have to be glamorous.
19:10:07 Finally, there's this drive, which is not a drive at all.
19:10:11 This is a holder for a drive and you take a drive one of these bear drives and you stick it in there and you have a hard drive.
19:10:19 And the nice thing is that after you dismount it. After you tell it to eject out of the computer and you turn this off, you can then take this out and take it someplace.
19:10:31 I store. Archives of stuff that is important to me on drives using this device And I stored at a bank in a savings deposit savings.
19:10:44 Not a savings box. What do they call them? Bank deposit box bank I don't know.
19:10:52 Safe deposit box. That was the term I was looking for.
19:10:51 Safe deposit box.
19:10:56 And the nice thing about that is that it's not near my computer. A lot of people, they store their archives on top of their desk that also has their computer. So when the thief comes in to steal a computer, they just brush everything else off the table
19:11:11 And they take everything with them. And an archive should never be near your computer.
19:11:17 And it technically should never be near your house. Is a kind of gruesome anecdote here.
19:11:27 The… government standard for off-site storage was that If a 707 hit your building you had to store your backup copies outside of the blast radius.
19:11:45 Of the disaster. This was actually written into government regulations.
19:11:50 After 9-11, they changed that Your offsite storage can't be in the same city.
19:12:00 We live in Squim. It's unlikely that we're going to have anybody try and run a 747 into any buildings around here.
19:12:09 So if you have it stored at any of the banks here in a safe deposit box, that's fine.
19:12:14 Doesn't need to be in a different city. I will tell you, though, that at one point In my life when I was in a place that had better bandwidth.
19:12:25 I had a disk drive in my brother's house in Alexandria.
19:12:31 That every day that every day My computer in Maryland would send backups of things to his drive in Virginia.
19:12:40 And it was cheap because I didn't have to pay for rental on in my brother's apartment and he had to set up similar in mine But we also had much better bandwidth back then. I can send things at gigabit speed back and forth between states.
19:12:53 And I don't know if you've tried that around here, but ours are at the whatever speed the raccoons happen to be traveling. They don't really get up to gigabyte speed.
19:13:05 So those are kind of the options when it comes to disk drives. Inside of your Mac that you have now.
19:13:13 If you have an older Mac, it's probably got a desktop Mac. It's going to be one of these three and a half inch drives that I showed you. It's going to be one of these in the side of an iMac or something like that. If you have one of the newer
19:13:28 Apple Silicon drives What does the drive in an Apple Silicon drive look like?
19:13:38 In an Apple Silicon drive, which is one of the ones that's got the M1, M2, M23, M4 trip chips.
19:13:45 The chip that is the computer itself is also the drive. It's all one thing.
19:13:52 Oh.
19:13:51 It's one huge chip. It's got storage on it. It's got memory on it. It's got the processors on it. It's all basically the same thing.
19:14:01 And that's why when you buy it you can't You can't upgrade things separately later on because it's basically you're buying the computer is a one-shot deal.
19:14:11 And Apple did that because among other things, they say that What they told people is the cost of production is easier because you can manufacture and all. The other thing that it does, though, is it speeds things up.
19:14:25 If you consider that if you consider the speed of light in a millionth of a second travels about 11 inches.
19:14:34 In a millionth of a second, travels 11 inches. So if you have a one square foot board And it's got a chip over here and it's got a chip over here. It takes a millionth of a second to travel that distance.
19:14:47 But if they're sitting right next to each other. An eighth of an inch apart you've now sped up your computer by a factor of about 500.
19:14:57 So you can make it faster Simply because the light or in this case, the electricity doesn't have to go as far.
19:15:05 You can make it much, much, much faster. And that's why Apple did it. Apple came up with these huge speed improvements over their machines And they did it by just making everything much, much, much smaller so things didn't have to travel as far to do things.
19:15:23 It's what's fun with physics. The next thing I'm going to do, well, one more thing I want to talk to you about, and that is these were drives that I showed you.
19:15:33 But this is also a drive. A USB drive. It's a usb a connector, which means it's got one of the big rectangular ones on it. This one is 128 gigs.
19:15:50 And this one here that's pink and belongs to my church is 32 gigs. If you look at them, they're physically the same size.
19:15:59 And I mentioned this last time and I, of course, lost track of it now.
19:16:05 But I have one here that's tiny. This one here, which is basically about the same size as my fingernail.
19:16:11 This is 512 gigabytes. This tiny little thing here.
19:16:19 Has… a quarter of the storage of this huge thing here. This one's two terabytes. This one's 512.
19:16:28 So if you think about archival storage. Just by backing your photographs, the question earlier was, how do you want to archive photographs so that they're safe?
19:16:40 Go out and buy a bunch of these. You can get these on Amazon cheap.
19:16:44 And this stores 128 gigabytes worth of photographs. Quite easily. That's a lot of photographs on a really inexpensive thing that does not require any power.
19:16:56 Once you stick it in the bank vault, it could just sit there for a long time.
19:17:00 And I recommend that if you're going to do it this way that you also get a bunch of The Carl Key envelopes they're they're they're big enough so that you can hold a house key.
19:17:12 And you can buy them in stationery stores and such, but you want to look for a key envelope.
19:17:16 And the reason is that you write on the key envelope what's inside of the of the drive because there's not enough room to ride on the drive And you can just say, you know, photos of Barcelona or whatever it is that happens to be on the drive.
19:17:31 But these are inexpensive. They don't take a lot of space and you can stick a lot of these in a safe deposit box. I mean a lot of these in a safe deposit box.
19:17:40 But I happen to use these the hard drives i have one of these, it's eight terabytes that's in my bank vault. And that's my offsite storage But in addition to that, I also have another off-site storage service that I'll talk about. I'm going to show my desk right now.
19:18:03 If I can remember how to do that.
19:18:08 We're going to go here. And we don't need you to see that.
19:18:19 I'm going to show you my hard drives. This one here that's called Conto.
19:18:24 Province in Japan in case you want to know what it was.
19:18:28 This is the icon for my drive. Pasted a custom icon on it.
19:18:34 It says it's a 16 terabyte drive. So this is 16 trillion bytes of storage on it. And if I open it up.
19:18:43 It'll tell you that it's got all kinds of stuff. It's got stuff for the straight Mac group.
19:18:49 It's got stuff for my church. It's got a bunch of stuff on it.
19:18:52 But much more interesting is if I look at it with disk utility.
19:19:00 If I go to contour with disk utility it'll tell you that it'll tell you that Kanto is actually two different drives i have Two different drives that I put together into what's called a raid And the rate I use is called a
19:19:18 Mirror raid so that when I store something on conto it gets stored on two different drives simultaneously. So there are always two copies being stored, one on one drive.
19:19:29 One or the other. Why do I do this? If the drive fails.
19:19:35 It'll probably only be one drive at a time, which means that everything will still be on the other drive.
19:19:41 It makes two copies to make sure that it's on the other drive. So that's One thing that I do a little bit differently than probably most of you.
19:19:50 It's really easy to set up Andrea, to set up a RAID. You just have to have a box that holds two drives You have to go into disk utility and tell it to format the two and that they're making them array. They also have to be the same size.
19:20:01 They don't have to be from the same manufacturer, but If you have a four terabyte drive and an eight terabyte drive.
19:20:09 You can make a four terabyte mirrored RAID, which means you lose half the capacity of your big drive.
19:20:16 Because it's only going to be the same capacity as the smallest.
19:20:19 So you need two drives of the same size. And put them in the same box and you can buy them boxes from like other world computing and plug it into your machine and you now have a mirrored rate. And you don't have to buy any extra software.
19:20:32 They'll try to sell you extra software. You can do all of this using Apple Utility.
19:20:37 But I wanted to show you a couple other things. If we look at Kanto again.
19:20:44 And I realized that this is going to be really tiny. So just take my word for it. Where it says format, it says the format is APFS.
19:20:53 Apfs stands for Apple File System. For those of you who've been around Max for a long time ago, you remember that they used to have something called HFS, which stands for hierarchical file system and then it came out with
19:21:09 Hfs Plus and HFS extended And hierarchical Maya file system means that The operating system got sophisticated enough that you could have things inside of other things and that creating a hierarchy.
19:21:21 And that was really cool. And Apple had that forever and ever and ever.
19:21:26 But about eight or 10 years ago, they came up with APFS.
19:21:30 And they came up with APFS to speed things up. Using the old Apple hierarchical file system I have one directory that's got like 1200 folders in it.
19:21:42 When I open that directory. It would take about a minute for it to refresh the screen and show me what was in that directory. Just show me the listing. It took about a minute.
19:21:52 With APFS, it shows up instantaneously. And so that's Kanto here has an APFS drive But this one here called time travel is slightly different.
19:22:05 Time travel is my time machine drive. And what my time capsule draw, my time machine drive is, is an external drive.
19:22:12 Just one of these external drives. It happens to be a drive that I got off of Amazon for a hundred bucks And it's a two terabyte drive and it's made by Toshiba. And it's bus powered. So I just plugged it into an existing drive
19:22:28 And told my Mac use that drive for Time Machine.
19:22:33 And here we have Kanto, which has APFS. And I'm going to click on time machine and ask what it has.
19:22:39 And Time Machine says time travel is the name of the drives and not time machine It says it's a four chair top right drive. I thought it was two.
19:22:47 It says it's four terabyte drive, but it says it's apfs case sensitive.
19:22:56 What does that mean?
19:23:02 Any idea?
19:23:10 Well, let's do a test here.
19:23:18 I'm writing, I created a folder called and creating another folder called Fred Uppercase.
19:23:26 Mint says that Fred has already taken please choose a different name.
19:23:29 Okay, I can call this one. Fred, too.
19:23:36 But I can also create a folder that is called Freddie that's upper and lower in case So one's all uppercase, one's lowercase, and one's both.
19:23:48 Mac operating system says, okay, I'll let you do that. If you format something in Windows, Windows.
19:23:56 Tries to make all folders uppercase. You have to actually fight with it to get upper and lower case.
19:24:03 If you order these alphabetically, you'll see that Freddie's at the bottom because it's got a Y and so on and so forth. Fred's at the top. And if you reverse it, it reverses that.
19:24:12 But they really are different names. However, Unix, the underlying operating system, allows you to have Fred, all uppercase, Fred all lowercase, Fred upper and lowercase in the same directory.
19:24:28 Apple changed that. So because people were confused by that, they couldn't tell the difference. They didn't realize that Fred uppercase could be different than fred lowercase that could be different from capital F, lowercase R-E-D. So apple made it case insensitive.
19:24:48 For users, but it's an option. You can actually turn that off.
19:24:52 And the way you do that is by using disk utility.
19:24:59 If we look at disk utility and we give it something to format, and what do I want it to I don't actually want to format anything, but I at least want to bring it up.
19:25:10 And let's see. Will you show up on my desktop?
19:25:17 And… Apparently not.
19:25:33 I don't want to format a… actual drive so i'm going to play with uh Yeah.
19:25:45 Usb drive, if I can get it to show up on the desktop.
19:25:52 And it's being difficult.
19:26:03 Hmm.
19:26:14 Okay, this is a USB.
19:26:20 Drive and it's called pink And I'm going to erase it.
19:26:25 And so I come up here and I say erase disk And it asked me, do I want APFS?
19:26:31 Do I want Mac OS? Went EXFS or MS-DOS fat.
19:26:38 It doesn't offer me the chance to make it case sensitive.
19:26:45 But… It is possible if you set it up to be a time machine drive that it'll erase it. If you tell it to be a time machine drive, it'll make it case sensitive.
19:26:57 Does anyone want to venture a guess as to why?
19:27:06 It's very possible that you could have a drive. That you have a document in one folder called Fred.
19:27:12 And a document in another folder called Fred. One is upper and lower case Fred. One is lowercase Fred. One is uppercase only Fred.
19:27:21 They're three different documents. They could be copies of the same document, exactly the same, contents exactly the same.
19:27:28 Three different file names that for whatever reason that's important to you When it backs it up.
19:27:35 When Time Machine backs it up. It wants to make sure that it's keeping track of three different documents. So that's why it's case sensitive.
19:27:44 It's trying to protect all the data you have. When you back it up to time machine.
19:27:50 If you have this untitled folder icon here. And you move it over here.
19:27:54 The next time it backs it up, it knows that it's now over there and not towards the center like it used to be.
19:28:01 It remembers its position. If you give it a color, like I make this one yellow.
19:28:07 And see the little yellow dot there? It now knows that it's got a little yellow dot. It tries to remember every single characteristic there is about the drive.
19:28:15 Including whether it's upper and lower case name. So that's why time machine stores things case sensitive.
19:28:27 And it does it automatically. If you plug a drive in and it says, would you like to use this for time machine? And you say yes It'll reformat the drive.
19:28:36 And it'll make it upper and lower case sensitive.
19:28:42 Here's a question for you. Given that Time Machine will reformat it.
19:28:49 Can you use a time machine drive? To be both a a… a time machine drive.
19:29:00 And also a data drive.
19:29:09 No, but not. Or if you've formatted it, you're doing away with what you had on there before.
19:29:12 Why?
19:29:23 Okay.
19:29:17 Well, yes, but after you format it, maybe you can come back and and uh and uh you know, store drives. You could partition it for example you could partition derived, so it looks like two drives store data on one side and have the archive on the other side.
19:29:30 Okay. Let me see.
19:29:35 Does that sound like a good idea? I'm kind of thinking that this bad idea. Why is it a bad idea?
19:29:47 You want your backup separate. It's the parachute. You don't travel in the parachute.
19:29:39 Well… You want your backup separate from your I mean, work stuff
19:29:51 Use the parachute to escape the thing. That you jumped out of. So you don't store your lunch in your parachute.
19:29:59 That's a bad idea. Use a backpack for that. And you don't use your backup drive as a data drive at the same time.
19:30:07 It's one or the other. The other thing you can do, you might have heard of people and I don't. Oh, yes, you are. Steve is really fond of me showing me these utilities do interesting things. There are utilities out there that allow you
19:30:23 To look at what time machine is doing. And allow you to modify its schedule and a bunch of other things.
19:30:30 Is that a good idea? That's another leading question.
19:30:37 That's a terrible idea. It works out of the box.
19:30:42 That your initial backup is going to take a while because it has to back up everything.
19:30:46 And so if I have a 20 terabyte drive It's going to, if I have 18 terabytes on a 20 terabyte drive.
19:30:56 It's got to back up 18 trillion bytes the first time. That's going to take a while.
19:31:03 But the next backup it's only going to back up what changed.
19:31:08 It only backs up what's changed. So the next backup's almost instantaneous.
19:31:13 And it'll do that every hour. As long as this machine is on.
19:31:18 And there used to be a commercial for I think it was a margarine substitute.
19:31:27 Where Mother Nature got mad And attack somebody and said, you don't mess with mother nature That also applies to Time Machine. Don't mess with Time Machine. It does its job right out of the box exactly the way it's supposed to.
19:31:43 The third party utilities that mess with time machine. A lot of them actually break time machine Just don't do that. It backs things up. It comes with your Mac. It's been on your Mac for over a decade.
19:31:56 Just use it. Yes.
19:31:57 I have a question. I'm not sure I understand.
19:32:04 If you could get everything… back from time machine as far as data Why would you want to archive it separately?
19:32:14 Okay, that's a good question. A lot of this has to go back with my case where I was talking to you about the 747 hits the building, destroys everything.
19:32:27 You and actually it was a 707, 747 is a completely different animal.
19:32:35 If your backup is in your house. And your house catches fire or your house is flooded.
19:32:42 The backup doesn't do you any good because it probably destroyed the backup too. Destroyed your computer and your backup.
19:32:47 If you have an off-site archive. Which can include, among other things, your Apple account.
19:32:56 Your Apple services account. If you have an off-site archive.
19:33:01 You buy a new machine, you plug in your archive And you'll have everything you had up to the point of your house catching on fire or the flood or whatever it was.
19:33:12 Because it's not next to it. If you're not if your time machine backup drive is right next to your computer, which for most people it's going to be.
19:33:25 Oh.
19:33:22 Whatever affects your computer is going to affect that machine. I'll give you a really good example from my own experience. When Time Machine first came out.
19:33:35 This was on the East Coast, which has a lot more lightning stories than we have around here.
19:33:41 Lightning hit our house. And technically it hit the tree outside but it fried a bunch of stuff in the house. It fried my computer.
19:33:52 It fried my external backup. It did not fry my time machine drive, which was on a different circuit in the house.
19:34:02 It was a time capsule. It was on a different circuit in the house.
19:34:06 I got a new machine about a week later. And press the little button and it restored everything just as it was from the last backup, which means that it was less than an hour old, everything that was on that time capsule.
19:34:20 Was less than an hour old. That's really great.
19:34:24 If it had been right next to the machine, it would have fried that too. It was just because it was on a separate circuit and it only blew out half the house, then I could do that.
19:34:34 But if it destroyed everything in the house. It's not going to touch the stuff that's in the bank vault.
19:34:42 Won't the bank vault stuff get obsolete eventually and how often do you have to keep doing it?
19:34:46 Yes, because… Well, the answer is I have it on my calendar. It reminded me to do it every six months and it doesn't store everything because I have a whole bunch of stuff.
19:34:57 So it stores it's on that eight terabyte drive. It stores what I think is the most important eight terabytes.
19:35:04 It's not everything. So it's got my income tax statements and wills and things like that. It gets stored on that drive along with photographs and things that are not easy to replace.
19:35:16 So that's what I keep at the bank. And I put a note in my calendar and it'll come up and nag me.
19:35:23 Have you taken your drive to the bank? And when I take it to the bank, I take the old one, bring it home, erase it.
19:35:29 And refill it again. So that's the way that I keep that off-site archive. But another cheaper way to do it, if you don't want to go that way.
19:35:41 Yeah.
19:35:39 Is just use these and use these are fairly and you can go out and you can get these in sizes up to a terabyte. Now terabyte USB drives. There are two reasons why you shouldn't do that.
19:35:51 Storing to these USB drives is a lot slower than it is to store to a hard drive. So you have to be patient.
19:35:57 The other thing is that the terabyte USB drives are expensive. You can go out and get 10 of these for a lot less than you can get one terabyte USB drives. So go out and get what's inexpensive.
19:36:09 And get name brand ones. So get things like Lexar or Lexar or our SanDisk or something like that, a name brand. You'll find a lot of no name USB drives and the no name USB drives are A, slower, and B, you just have no idea how good they are.
19:36:28 There's a company that's in part of the United States, but not around here called Micro Center.
19:36:33 And in Micro Center, up at the cash register, they had these what those displays that they have at counters are called pop displays. It stands for point of purchase.
19:36:42 You're about to spend money. Oh, we're going to have this little thing here that you can spend more money on.
19:36:48 And they'll sell you USB drives for just dirt cheap. Don't buy those. They're not reliable and they're extremely slow.
19:36:57 The standard now, the fastest USB flash drives that you can get are ones that are USB 3.1.
19:37:05 Those are the ones that you should get. Sometimes they're more expensive, but a USB 3.1 flash drive saving to it is 20 times faster than saving it to a USB 2.0.
19:37:17 So it's not a small difference. It's a big difference. And even if you tell it to go and you leave for lunch.
19:37:25 You still want it to be done by the time you get home with lunch. And with the older drives.
19:37:30 It may not be that way. Another thing to note, and I should have mentioned this earlier.
19:37:35 All USB drives are formatted with with usually either FAT16 or FAT32 formatting.
19:37:45 Fat 16 and fat 32 is a Windows file format. Backing up a Mac, you should never back up to FAT16 or FAT32.
19:37:55 Why? Well, when I showed you that. That folder and i i it's in upper lowercase and I made it yellow and I put it a particular place on the screen.
19:38:06 Fat doesn't know about any of that stuff. It throws that information away.
19:38:10 So you're throwing a bunch of information away that your Mac finds important. So when you get your USB drives, format them as what is it?
19:38:24 Mac OS extended or whatever. You can't form them that it's APFS.
19:38:29 Apfs is only for solid state drives. But you can format as HFS extended or whatever it's called. Journal, I don't remember what the current name is.
19:38:40 You want to format it in a Mac format so that way when you store stuff on it, it actually retains all that information.
19:38:47 And again, I recommend doing what I do. Have a color coding system so you can tell which things you've backed up.
19:38:53 So the next time you need to back stuff up, you'll say, oh, those things are already taken care of.
19:38:58 And stick them in an envelope with a label on it so you know what it is.
19:39:03 This is really the cheapest way you can archive stuff. It's just outstanding.
19:39:09 I recommend these these, I call them drive toasters, but it's a removable drive You can get these from OWC as well.
19:39:20 And they come in, they actually now have Thunderbolt ones, so they're much faster this one is a It's an old type of Thunderbolt, but it's this one's fast as well, but not as fast as the newer ones. And you can get them with two drives. So you can have two of these in the
19:39:35 In the toaster and write to both of them. Those are good if you have a lot of stuff that you want to archive because you can just write to the pastor because you're writing to a real disk.
19:39:58 A flashlight like
19:39:58 Fast, but… This is…

Part 2

19:43:25 Maybe it's recording us, yeah.
19:43:29 My video's on.
19:43:30 There he is.
19:43:31 You're back.
19:43:37 Oh, he's down there, yeah.
19:43:34 Oh, there you are. Lawrence, Steve was just asking about using the port angeles library for an in-person to be able to do it before fall. Just really quick, wasn't there something about the Port Angeles library that doesn't work?
19:43:57 I don't.
19:43:56 Was it something with their internet or connectivity i just somehow something sticks that There was a reason why it didn't work.
19:44:05 I don't know. I've never been in that building. I borrow a lot of books, but I frequently don't go to the library to do it.
19:44:16 I…
19:44:16 Okay.
19:44:15 Well, we used to have way back when, when we had both Port Angeles and And Squim we had the meetings in Port Angeles. And it seemed to work okay
19:44:25 Yeah, that's how I remember it way back from almost 20 years ago.
19:44:31 It was done that way. It was every other month, if I remember it correctly.
19:44:33 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
19:44:37 Where are the majority of members located though?
19:44:39 That would be nice to know. Aside from Steve that said he's in PA, I don't know
19:44:49 I'm sorry, I don't know your name. I can't read it really.
19:44:47 I'm in school.
19:44:53 I just hear you. I see him raising his voice or his voice, his hand, but his voice is off.
19:45:03 And… Andrew.
19:45:04 Careful in the
19:45:09 So anyway, didn't he say it was, didn't you say you were from Squim, Everl
19:45:15 I think that was probably me, Ron Brown.
19:45:20 Oh, Ron, where did you go? Oh, there you are.
19:45:25 Oh, we're losing people. Well, annual.
19:45:31 He's talking, but his microphone is off.
19:45:37 Mr. Rule, your microphone's off.
19:45:44 Poor guy.
19:45:47 Okay, there we go. Okay. Okay.
19:45:48 It's on.
19:45:49 Now I hear you.
19:45:53 Saying was that We used to meet years and years ago.
19:45:58 In Port Angeles. One month, the next month would be in Squim. We shuttled back and forth.
19:46:04 And that seemed to be workable because we did have a lot of people in Port Angeles, it only seemed fair that we try to split that in some way so i'm to go to Port Angeles doesn't mean a lot of other people are.
19:46:20 But I'm certainly willing to go.
19:46:25 But that's just me speaking. And use the library because that's what we did before.
19:46:28 I think we'd have the consent. Yeah, and how many are on either side?
19:46:35 And I don't mind either way, but I think we have more in Squim currently.
19:46:41 Maybe we have.
19:46:41 I will tell you that when I ran the Washington apple pie group and on the On the East Coast.
19:46:50 The Washington apple pie covered Washington, Maryland. Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware.
19:46:59 And we alternated. Unevenly between Maryland and Virginia.
19:47:06 And every month I would go to the meeting regardless of what state it was in, and to get from my home to… The site in Virginia took me two hours.
19:47:20 Oh, my.
19:47:22 So, and that's two hours of East Coast traffic That's not two hours down. That's not 20 minutes down old Olympic Highway.
19:47:32 I'm willing to do what you guys want, unless it's something that you want to meet at the Kitsap County Library. I'm not willing to do that.
19:47:43 So Lawrence, when you were talking about having an in-person meeting, were you talking about multiples or using this format most of the time and then doing that just once in a while or annually or something like that.
19:47:58 It was once in a while because there are some things that I really can't demonstrate over zoom like for example, if I want to show you how to format a disk When the Mac is formatting a disk.
19:48:10 It basically stops everything else. So I would lose the video. Or if I'm trying to show you how to do a reboot your machine without having anything running.
19:48:23 There's a way to do that. It's called a safe boot. I can't do that in the middle of a Zoom session because, of course, everything goes away when I reboot.
19:48:30 So there's some things I can't really demonstrate. Unless it's live. The advantage to this format is that people can do it in your home.
19:48:41 One advantage. But another advantage is it's a lot easier to see what I'm doing Because my screen is on your screen.
19:48:50 Yeah.
19:48:50 You're not trying to see something that's postage stamp image of a monitor mounted on a wall someplace. So that's a huge advantage.
19:49:01 And the other thing, I've even done Zoom sessions for troubleshooting for people.
19:49:06 I'll bring up a Zoom session there on the other end and I'll have them show me their screen and that's also useful because while I'm having trouble doing this well show me your screen.
19:49:17 They show me the screen and it shows up on my screen. I don't have to go to their But you can do that same kind of trick for demonstrations. If we had a guest presenter I could have him share his screen and him do the presentation. And that's a lot harder to do in person.
19:49:39 Is it possible to make a video of the in-person one?
19:49:45 So that in case you can't attend or something. You can see it on the website or something.
19:49:53 Well, yeah. You kind of, the trick to that is that you kind of want to show the guy doing the presentation But you also want to show what it is that he's doing.
19:50:04 That's not one camera, that's two. And that gets complicated.
19:50:07 Oh, okay.
19:50:10 I've done instructional videos and and the moon launch sometimes is easier to do than an instructional video.
19:50:20 It's I did an instructional video on how to NOAA has these things that we call them weather buoys, but really that's not really what they are, but we call them weather buoys.
19:50:33 They're about the size of a… three bedroom house and they're controlled by a laptop. Why are they controlled by a laptop? Laptops are battery powered.
19:50:43 And they'll sit there and do things in isolation. We don't have to have a computer inside of this house size thing.
19:50:49 And they're attached to a chain and we can measure the tension on this chain to see if the tides going in and out and which way the current's going, what the water temperature is in selenia, all these things.
19:51:01 In this weather buoy. Well, somebody wanted me to do an instructional video on how you set up the computer in the weather buoy.
19:51:10 And how you connect it to all of the telemetry. I did not work for the people at NOAA who run the weather bureaus. I worked for National Ocean Service, but their rationale was Well, you work for National Ocean Service and you do educational things. So can you do this?
19:51:29 It took about 20 people for us to do this instructional video.
19:51:35 Because there's just a lot of different types of things you have to show, what the connectors look like.
19:51:41 What the machinery looks like. And then people also wanted to see me. So I was this little I took up about a quarter of the machine, the screen so you could see me. But then there were all these other cameras showing the things that I was talking about.
19:51:56 And it took us like four or five tries to get it the way we wanted.
19:52:01 And I learned a lot about instructional video. And I'm thinking about it'll be a next Wes Kraven horror movie when I release it.
19:52:12 It'll terrify most of you just seeing what it takes. Actually.
19:52:16 I want to come back to the issue about meeting in PA or Squim or using this format. My vote is to continue using using this format.
19:52:29 Until the point at which you have a very specific instruction that requires people in attendance. So that would seem to be the time we would then meet in person either swim or important tools.
19:52:40 Of course.
19:52:42 Well, I… I'll go along with that for about 80%, but there's a 20% there. There's a value to having in-person meetings beyond showing things that must be done in person.
19:52:55 Two of them is that you can bring props. Like I can show you things like this and you can actually play with it and see what it looks like. The other thing is that After a meeting, you can come up to me and say, well, I don't want to tell you this, but I did this dumb thing
19:53:12 You're asking for help and that's asking for help That's much easier to do in person than it is over something that's being recorded and broadcast.
19:53:20 So there are advantages to doing things in person. I used to joke to joke Kathleen, that the in-person meeting that I do every month in Virginia, the reason why it was twice as long as it seemed is there was the in-person part that everybody knew about.
19:53:37 And then there is the come up to the stage and ask me questions afterwards. That was one-on-one and that seem to take sometimes as much time as the meeting itself.
19:53:47 So there are advantages to having the personal touch but
19:53:51 Yeah, well, yeah, I certainly understand and support that because when we used to go back and forth, there was a lot of time after the official meeting where there was a lot of exchange of very useful ideas. So I do believe the meeting in person can be very important.
19:54:08 Very important. And maybe it's something that's done biannually or quarterly or something. I don't know what it is, but I do agree getting together in person becomes very important.
19:54:21 I do not live in PA. If someone could go there and… Ask them, how do you reserve a meeting? How much in advance do you need for that? How large is the room? What's the capacity for the room? What kind of projector do you
19:54:39 Have the projector is kind of critical for us because I would probably use a MacBook.
19:54:45 And the MacBook has a USB-C connector And most projectors don't know what to do with a USB-C connector.
19:54:56 I kind of need that kind of information. So if somebody who lives in PA could do some research for me that would be useful. I have no objection to meeting in PA.
19:55:06 I have no objection to meeting in person in in In Squim, it's not something I'm going to think about in the next month or two because uh I have my spouse's memorial service two weeks from now and I'm kind of
19:55:22 Occupied with that. And then I have some other things that I'm have to do in May. So it would probably be June, July, August would be the earliest that I'd even consider something like that.
19:55:34 But I have no objection to this because again i see I see value in in-person interactions.
19:55:43 Person I know was telling me that they dated this woman online for a year and a half before they met.
19:55:50 And I was thinking. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but that wouldn't work for me just
19:55:57 No.
19:55:59 I wouldn't get the same warm fuzzies that way that in person.
19:56:05 Just would not work for me but um
19:56:08 But would it really be practical for everybody to bring their computers to you?
19:56:13 On a day that you're in person, it would take forever, wouldn't it, to view… for you to help everybody
19:56:17 What do you mean? Oh, no. I didn't do that. People would come up and ask me questions saying i i did X, Y, Z, and I know it was stupid. What do I do to get out of this? They'd ask me those questions.
19:56:35 Because they didn't want to ask that in front of everybody else.
19:56:39 In a meeting like this where it's recorded, somebody has questions like that that they don't want to ask.
19:56:45 And in an in-person meeting, they come up to me afterwards and they could ask me questions like that.
19:56:50 That's something you can do. In person that you really can't do.
19:56:54 Remotely. People have some reticence about admitting that they did something that they suspected was a dumb idea at the time and they found out that it was that it really was.
19:57:10 Confirming things like that is best done in private. That's an advantage of an in-person. In addition to the fact that there are just some things I can't demonstrate. There are… Last month, and one reason why I regret not talking about Time Machine last month
19:57:32 April 30th was World Backup Day. And I used to make a big thing out of World Backup Day because World Backup Day was found it, well, I will tell you this Every single unrecoverable error that anyone has ever brought to my attention
19:57:51 Came because they didn't have a backup. An unrecoverable error that kills your machine is not unrecoverable if you have a backup.
19:58:01 But if you don't have a backup, an unrecoverable error is unrecoverable.
19:58:08 And that might seem simple. I'm not going to embarrass you. I'm not going to ask how many of you are using Time Machine now.
19:58:17 But the answer should be 100%. And if I did a poll, the answer would not be 100%.
19:58:25 And it's been in every single Mac operating system for over a decade
19:58:34 Like 15, 18 years. It's been there for a while. When Time Machine first debuted.
19:58:43 I was instantly interested in it because Kathleen wanted a laptop.
19:58:48 And Kathleen's terrible about doing backups, as in she just didn't. Backups, she might have a PhD in informatics but backups were for people like me to take care of. They weren't for people like her to take care of. So she didn't do backups.
19:59:05 With Time Machine, she had a laptop and the laptop moves with a time capsule, which can back things up wirelessly, I could back up her laptop without doing anything. Just set up time capsule time machine to back up over the Wi-Fi to the time capsule. She could do whatever she wanted and we'd get backed up.
19:59:28 I thought this was great, but I was also very skeptical. So what I did in the original time capsule used 802.11.
19:59:38 B or C or it was a slower version of Wi-Fi.
19:59:42 With just a gig on a machine. I backed it up to time capsule wirelessly without touching anything.
19:59:51 It took like 20 to back up one gig.
19:59:56 Or maybe it was maybe it was 10 gigs. I guess it was 10 gigs. Took 20 hours to back it up.
20:00:03 Then I erased. Her laptop.
20:00:07 And restored it wirelessly. And again, it took 20 hours. And at the end, it worked exactly the same as it did at the time that I backed it up.
20:00:18 And that convinced me that this was a winning strategy, that time capsule was nothing less than brilliant. And that was 15, 20 years ago I did this.
20:00:27 So you're saying that you did this on hers, not yours, right?
20:00:31 Hers was a brand new machine and it had stuff on it, but it didn't. I had copies of everything on it so Erasing it was not a risk because they already had copies of it. I had her old machine plus the new laptop. So before I gave her the laptop, I did this experiment, put everything on the laptop.
20:00:50 Backed it up wirelessly, erased her machine, copied everything back, and it worked.
20:00:55 And that's what a backup should be doing. And if you're not using time machine, you can't do that.
20:01:02 And…
20:01:02 Well, I have a comment about there or a question. I belong to the church of type of time machine okay i do we use time machine all the time. But my real question is that, okay, something happens, then mechanically, how do we deal with this? How do you activate
20:01:21 Time machine to get it back to get it back your desktop, et cetera, et cetera. That's something that puzzles me.
20:01:31 I will. I will… Well, not actually…
20:01:37 Zoom is telling me to do something.
20:01:44 I assume it's telling gave me a message. I didn't know what it was trying to do.
20:01:43 Zoom is what?
20:01:48 I went to answer your question. And the answer is if we go up here.
20:01:51 Yes.
20:01:56 Yes. Yeah.
20:01:56 Where is Time Machine? There it is. Browse time machine backups.
20:02:01 And it brings up this window. And you can find my boot volume is conto I go and I look in here and it's folder called Lois's Legacy. And I find what I want. And if it's an old thing.
20:02:18 Well, let's go back in time. So…
20:02:30 Time machine allows you to go back in time over a certain thing to… Browse time machine backups.
20:02:38 Try this again because it didn't do what I wanted. It doesn't like the fact that Zoom is active.
20:02:47 Well, anyway, take my word for it. You just go up to the time machine menu if you have it in your menu bar and if you don't.
20:02:53 I do.
20:02:54 You can go to… system settings and time machine. And it allows you to go back in time and you can find the date that you had that document and you can pull it back.
20:03:06 I don't really like saying that's how you use time machine because that's really That really should be an archiving issue rather than a backup issue.
20:03:17 The real function for the backup is your hard drive dies.
20:03:23 So you go out and you get another machine or another hard drive and you get your machine up and running, put in your name, password.
20:03:30 And you point it at your time machine drive and you say restore from that.
20:03:35 And then you go out to dinner. And when you come back, assuming that it's not a huge amount of stuff.
20:03:42 Everything will be put back on your machine. As it was at the time that your machine died.
20:03:48 So at the most an hour, you might have lost an hour's worth of work.
20:03:53 If you happen to create something between the last backup and And when you restored it. And that's the advantage of time machine that one of the advantages is that time capsule, not time capsule, migration assistant, which is how you set up a new machine.
20:04:11 One of the choices that you make is restore from a time machine backup.
20:04:17 When Kathleen got her new backup, that's what I, laptop, that's what I did.
20:04:21 Pointed out time machine backup drive and said restore from backup.
20:04:26 And her new machine looked just like her old machine. And she didn't have to do anything. She didn't have to select.
20:04:33 If you see people who drag things off. They're really creating an archive. And if they think they're doing a backup, they're not because they drag this stuff off and then send it all jumbled. It's not in the same It's not in the same way that it was on their computer. When you restore from Time Machine, it's the same way.
20:04:51 It's in the same folders. It's got the same dates on it. Didn't change the modification dates or anything.
20:04:57 It's the same. And that's what a backup really is. And it's easy to do.
20:05:08 Yes.
20:05:06 Lawrence, I have… I have a confusion. It seems to me that you keep talking about time machine as being used for restoring After you have lost everything. It seems to me that since it shows you all kinds of different versions of the same stuff going back to
20:05:26 Adam, when you started, that it ought to be a reference for you if you screw up some document or you're wondering, well, what was this like in 1951 when I did it or, you know.
20:05:38 I'm exaggerating that that is for finding things when when something has gone wrong in the present, not your whole machine exploding Just one thing that got messed up.
20:05:52 And that you saved inadvertently a mistake that you made or whatever, that you could go back and find a better version of it and pull that forward to keep working with.
20:06:05 Apple. Apple.
20:06:05 You have that and that's what I miss. That's what I figured would be the function of time machine really
20:06:12 That's… Yes, but here's my take on that.
20:06:12 Yeah, Time Machine has saved me that way many times.
20:06:20 Apple sold that as a way to get people interested in it because Because backups are not sexy. But what you're really talking about are archives and a better way to archive is to make copies.
20:06:32 If you have a document that you're working on and you decide, I'm not wild about this draft, make a copy of that and give it a different date And I have things like if I send out a letter If I send out a letter to an insurance company
20:06:46 And the insurance company was USAA. So it was USAA. And then I put the date on the end of it, USAA 2025-0217. I sent it out on the 20th On the 17th day of February 2025.
20:07:04 And then if I have, if they're not responding and I refer to my other And I went to complain about it, I say, in my letter to you of February 17th, 2025, I said such and such and such and such, and you did not respond.
20:07:23 That original letter is really an archive copy. And I want to treat it as an archive. So I create a new document and I save that with a different date.
20:07:34 That's true archiving. This trick going back in time sometimes does not work. Why? Because if it's really old.
20:07:41 Time machine will get rid of the oldest stuff in order to make room for your new backup.
20:07:47 I want to show you my screen again. It should freak you out.
20:07:53 If I show you this. And… This is my time machine drive.
20:08:01 And when I did a get info on this to show you how big it was, you might recall that it said it was four terabytes.
20:08:08 I'm going to open it up. And we're going to look at it. And I've got a menu bar here in the middle of the screen that I want to get out of the way.
20:08:17 If you look at this, it says it has 150 copies of something and they're averaging around say Well, I can actually see the largest one 1.35 terabytes And the smallest is 541 terabytes. So let's say there's let's call it 700 terabytes.
20:08:39 Total 700 gigabytes 700 Times… 150.
20:08:49 Is that is… 105 terabytes worth of documents.
20:08:57 On my time machine dry. Except that I showed you right over here, it's only four terabytes How am I storing 105 terabytes on a four terabyte drive?
20:09:18 I will tell you. These, it's telling you the size of the entire file structure of my boot drive.
20:09:26 It's storing a copy of the directory. But it's only storing the new files. So it gives you the size of my boot drive at that particular point.
20:09:39 It says it was 1.5 teraby 1.3 terabytes or whatever, or it was 683 gigabytes. But if you look inside, it's only storing the new files. It's not storing everything. It's not stirring every file. It's only storing changed files.
20:09:59 It's not storing. Archival information.
20:10:03 It's storing snapshots of your current file system. So when you go back in time It's hit or miss as to whether or not you can get that document that you wrote in.
20:10:15 2007, because if the machine needs more space, it gets rid of the oldest stuff.
20:10:22 It's a backup copy of your current machine. And if that's not on your current machine.
20:10:27 Then time machine says, well, I guess they don't need that anymore. So I'm going to throw away the oldest copy of that.
20:10:34 It's not an archiving system. It's a backup.
20:10:38 Okay.
20:10:41 I want to interject again that I do the same thing as you, Lawrence if i have a letter that's important, I archive that. And if I need it and I want to use it for something, I give that a different name.
20:10:57 And they're both saved. What I… wanted from or expected from time machine is if I'm sitting working with such a document right now And before I know it, I have made some mistake and i have I have destroyed the template I was using somehow.
20:11:20 That I could then go back and say, well, I want in time machine to find what I had yesterday Or maybe last week that was good. And instead, what I find is that I use my super duper backup because I know right now is when I goofed before I got the new things saved as a different name.
20:11:42 With things in order. So I just go to my super duper backup and I have not yet updated that.
20:11:50 And therefore, I can find the document that I just messed up intact and I can do a new copy that I save as some other name because it's a different thing. I have not found a single use for time machine I just, when I open it up, I see all these layers that look really confusing, one right behind the other. I don't see names like what you see here. I just see this display of fan-shaped stuff
20:12:21 That I can't figure out how to access anything that makes any sense.
20:12:25 Okay, there are actually instructions on how to use a time machine online and how to go back in time.
20:12:33 There's a timeline on the side of the screen and you use the timeline to find out how far back you have. And it's dated.
20:12:40 Basically this vertical calendar that runs along the side of the screen and you can go back like if you knew that you had that document the way you wanted on August 17th, you can go back to August 17th and you can
20:12:52 Restore that document. And it does that very well.
20:12:58 What I don't want people to… count on that archival copy being there because Time Machine does get rid of old stuff.
20:13:07 If you have a whole bunch of new stuff. It'll just overwrite the oldest copy.
20:13:12 And that oldest copy might be the one that you really need to have an archive copy.
20:13:16 And so that's why I want to say that it's a backup system. It is not an archiving system and neither is super duper. Super duper is a cloning system. It's not even a backup system.
20:13:28 It has a different purpose even from what I've been talking about.
20:13:32 And there's a difference between an archive and a backup and a clone.
20:13:37 The reason why I bought this drive was to make a clone of a startup disk so I could do diagnostics. That's a clone. It means it's an exact copy of another operating system.
20:13:48 Which is not a backup and it's not an archive. It's a different animal entirely.
20:13:54 And they have different purposes. But in terms of backup systems.
20:13:59 Time machine is an absolutely fantastic backup system.
20:14:04 And… If you don't mess with it, it does what it's supposed to do.
20:14:09 It doesn't seem to me like it's a backup system when it decides to get rid of the old stuff.
20:14:14 And that it keeps otherwise supposedly keeping track of everything that you're doing all the way along the way.
20:14:25 It doesn't seem like it's really backing up what is important.
20:14:25 Oh.
20:14:31 It's backing up your current machine. That's what a backup is. It's backing up your current machine.
20:14:37 And if it has space, it keeps the old stuff until it needs more space.
20:14:42 But in my particular case, I've been backing up to the same drive now for, I don't know, two years.
20:14:47 And I haven't filled it up because again, it only backs up stuff that has changed.
20:14:53 So I do have archival stuff there, but I don't count on that as archive the archive is again something that's not near your machine. And that's, I take it to the bank and that's my archive.
20:15:05 But if I want a backup of my machine. Right this second, that's what this second Time Machine does every time of the day all year.
20:15:16 Okay. I guess I've been thinking about it incorrectly all this time.
20:15:21 Well, again, I used to run in a, I used to work in a library. That's how I got through grad school. I worked in a library.
20:15:28 And I worked in acquisitions. We buy the books. Then there were the archival people. The archival people maintain documents.
20:15:38 Those documents they maintain, they did not let the public have their hands on it because they're archives.
20:15:44 The public had things where that was fairly easy to replace. So if they could go out and buy another copy of Faulkner's Beck's cellar.
20:15:51 That went out to the public and they could borrow it and do whatever they wanted to with it.
20:15:57 But the archive stuff no that was kept That's their preservation. And that's what an archive should be. It should not be a working copy of anything.
20:16:06 That's one of the big advantages of digitation. There were some of these The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example.
20:16:13 That are very fragile. Once we could digitize it, we could make millions of copies and millions of scholars all over the world could look at the Dead Sea Scrolls without going to Israel, without touching the original, because we had digital copies of it.
20:16:28 But those are copies. Those are essentially the backups that archival original, they don't touch.
20:16:36 And that's a big difference between your working copy, which is your computer in front of you, your backup copy, which is the thing that you use to recover if you have a problem and the archival copy, which is stored separately someplace away
20:16:51 Where it can't be messed up.
20:16:55 Oh, a lot clearer. Thank you.
20:17:01 Yes.
20:16:58 So Lawrence, got a question So your archival stuff is typically pretty selective. Is that correct?
20:17:07 In my case, yes, because I have like 150,000 photographs.
20:17:13 Yeah, yeah.
20:17:14 And… And they're mixed in with video and so on and so forth. And that just takes up a staggering amount of space.
20:17:22 I would fill up my entire safe deposit box with just disk drives if I did that.
20:17:22 Yeah.
20:17:27 But you wouldn't need to archive your whole computer.
20:17:34 No, I don't. I don't archive my entire computer.
20:17:41 It backs up it backs up the
20:17:35 Are we? No, no, no, no. I'm just saying that the backup backs up the whole computer each time Well, things that have changed, but I mean, it's got the whole computer there So if it dies or the drive dies, you can replace it and then it comes back as it was new. But that's the backup.
20:17:56 And the archive is you're saving stuff Specifically.
20:18:00 Yes.
20:18:06 That's good, so.
20:18:01 And so that's why when you make copies of it, you give it a date then that's archived on your system. You don't change it again So… Time Machine would keep that until it overrode it with something else. Is that correct?
20:18:20 It's not an archive, it's secure.
20:18:29 Yeah, yeah.
20:18:20 And it will… It overwrites the oldest documents first. So if you like in 2025, you do a snapshot of it doesn't an hourly snapshot and it says I need more room. It'll go back to the things that i backed up in 2017 because it assumes either I don't need it now or I've created a new copy someplace or something like that. So he gets rid of that.
20:18:46 Okay. Yeah.
20:18:48 Because it's making a snapshot of your machine. I forgot to show you one thing. I want to show you my drive again.
20:18:53 Because this is… Time Machine is making a snapshot of my boot drive.
20:18:56 I've been activated.
20:19:01 But I have a lot more on my machine than just my boot drive.
20:19:05 Of course.
20:19:04 And that other stuff is actually backed up using… Where is it? I don't see it.
20:19:17 So it's not really making a backup of your entire computer.
20:19:17 Back.
20:19:17 Lauren.
20:19:22 I have a way of doing that too.
20:19:33 Yes.
20:19:24 Is he eating with you? Yeah. Or it's while you're looking um deborah has been trying to ask a question But…
20:19:35 Oh, Lawrence, I'm guilty of not using Time Machine because I wasn't sure how it all worked. And so I have a real basic question for you.
20:19:46 Yes.
20:19:46 So if I have a little drive like this, if I want Time Machine to work Does it mean that I keep this little drive plugged into my laptop all the time?
20:20:01 Yes.
20:20:02 Because I only have two little ports there and i use Yeah.
20:20:05 Well, yes. The way around that is you get something like a drive dock, a portable dock, a USB.
20:20:14 It's a little device that you plug back into your machine that gives you a bunch of other peripheral ports. You can get them that have USB connectors and USB-C connectors and a bunch of different connectors. And I would show you mine except that it's being used right now.
20:20:32 But they're…
20:20:38 Yes.
20:20:32 Okay. I know what those are. And so I would put the drive into the hub And what do you suggest for a drive, just like one of the ones you were talking about, one of these Okay.
20:20:44 Yes. Yes. And also, um. If you're using your machine in the same place all the time, Costco sells these drives all the time with like, you know, eight terabyte my book.
20:20:59 Drives that they have. Boxes of at Costco and they cost like 150, 200 bucks buy one of those. You say, well, eight terabytes, that's more than I need. You don't care. It's being used for backup and it's inexpensive.
20:21:11 Plug that into your machine. Your machine looks at it and says, oh, can I use this for time machine? You say, yes.
20:21:17 It'll reformat it. If it does not reformat it. Do it manually because you definitely want it to be reformatted. If you store it using the file system that it comes with from the factory. It won't store all the information you want.
20:21:32 But it just has to be.
20:21:33 And oh okay sorry and how do you know if it's not formatted for Mac? Won't tell you?
20:21:41 Your Mac, if it doesn't prompt you to reformat it. Then you launch disk utility and tell it to reformat it.
20:21:44 I see.
20:21:50 Okay. Thank you.
20:21:52 I wanted to show you how I back up my entire machine.
20:21:56 Oh, yes. Ron Brown is showing you one of the little portable dive docs.
20:22:01 These things sell for like 30 bucks on Amazon and you can plug a whole bunch of different things into them.
20:22:02 Okay.
20:22:07 It's a way to get around the ports. Yeah.
20:22:07 Okay, thanks, Ron.
20:22:08 In these areas. These four are all USB-C.
20:22:14 And there's a couple of usb a's here and there's an HDMI on the end. And there's also room for a SD.
20:22:27 Yeah, so… Everything on one.
20:22:25 Sd card, yeah.
20:22:27 Okay. Thank you.
20:22:27 Yeah, yeah.
20:22:31 This is how I back up my entire machine. And my entire machine has One, two, three, four.
20:22:41 Five drives plus the time machine drive. So it's got six drives.
20:22:45 This is Backblaze, which is a commercial service. And what this does is it backs up everything on my machine to the cloud.
20:22:54 And because it's backing up over the cloud, this is slow.
20:22:59 But I don't care because it does it all the time.
20:23:01 And it has backed up I have, last time I checked, it had like 38 terabytes of stuff that I've save to back blaze.
20:23:17 And if I were to need to restore it, either I would buy a new machine, plug it in and let it slowly filter 38 terabytes worth of stuff back which could take years or could take years there's a service they have that you pay 150 bucks and they ship you
20:23:34 A hard drive with your stuff on it and then you copy it off the hard drive and send them the hard drive back.
20:23:40 But right now it says since its last backup and it does this continuously Since its last completed backup, there are 8,698,000 584.
20:23:53 Files to back up and they total 38 gigs But I can tell you right now that most of those are photographs and it's not going to take that long.
20:24:03 This works 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, and it just happens in the background.
20:24:08 And it sends me a report every month on how much stuff I've backed up.
20:24:13 And it's a commercial service that you have to pay for.
20:24:17 And… It's got a 30-day version history and a bunch of other stuff, but it's basically a backup.
20:24:24 It's not an archive, it's a backup. It maintains a continuous snapshot of all my drives on this machine.
20:24:33 So your internet service provider must be giving you unlimited data because it's always using it. Is that true?
20:24:41 Yes, I have the wave. Well, astound, but it's not really astounding. It's still wave.
20:24:49 I use Wave and I'm on the unlimited plan. And that means that the upload speed is only 30 megabytes per second, which sounds fast but When you're uploading 38 terabytes worth of stuff, it's not.
20:25:03 But it does this. It backs up everything. It's not just the stuff that I selected for archives. It's not just my boot drive. It's everything.
20:25:12 For most of you, you don't need anything this complicated because you only have, most of you only have one drive.
20:25:19 You have a laptop or you have an iMac or something and you only have one drive.
20:25:24 For most of you, all you need to do is go out and get a drive from Costco or off of amazon that should be twice as big as as the drive in your machine Plug it in and use it for Time Machine.
20:25:36 That's really all you have to do. Turn it on and forget it.
20:25:44 Yes.
20:25:43 Hey, Lawrence. Is it possible or is it recommended to make a bootable flash drive of your Mac operating system like Sequoia.
20:25:56 There's a… It depends upon what kind of machine you have. What happened to my… Well, is it an Intel machine?
20:26:01 Macbook Pro. No, it's an M2.
20:26:11 Oh, we can't.
20:26:07 The M2 can't do that. No, the security in the… In the M2 has… has basically made that You can make a bootable drive but you have to boot off your internal drive and then point it at the external drive and then do a second boot.
20:26:32 It does that as a security caution. Because the FBI was making bootable Mac drives, then booting up somebody's seized laptop And mounting it as if it's a data drive and stealing information off of it.
20:26:45 And Apple doesn't like that. So Apple now encrypts the drive.
20:26:49 And when you go into the drive, the drive is encrypted.
20:26:54 You stick this bootable drive onto it, you have to authenticate to that second drive and then you can boot off the external drive.
20:27:01 But it's a two-step process.
20:27:01 Well, what have your What if your system somehow got damaged and you need to reinstall the system? How would you do that if you can't log in. I mean, you can't even log in.
20:27:13 Since it's encrypted, if it gets damaged, you're going to do a full restore.
20:27:18 And at that point, you're going to erase the machine if you can. And if you can't, you're going to buy a new machine and restore from your time machine backup.
20:27:29 That's one of the problems with the problems with good security. Good security sometimes is inconvenient.
20:27:36 And if you have a machine that's encrypted and if you have an Apple Silicon machine, the drive is encrypted.
20:27:43 If that drive goes south, you can't do anything other than buy a new machine and restore from your time machine backup.
20:27:51 Wow. Yeah, because there used to be, I remember in my intel I would just have a little flash drive that would reboot the machine automatically and then you could just do whatever you needed to do to to figure out.
20:28:07 Yeah, with Apple Silicon that they've they've made it much more secure, but it also makes it more difficult.
20:28:13 I will also tell you that all the Apple Silicon machines have flash drives.
20:28:19 Because it's all on one chip. And that's another reason why if the drive goes bad, you have to buy a new machine because it's basically just one chip. It's not a separate piece anymore.
20:28:30 It's one chip.
20:28:31 But I was just thinking if the operating system was not working for you and you wanted to revert to an older version, you can't do it then.
20:28:39 Well, you can reinstall the operating system, but if it's really corrupted.
20:28:43 But you can't log in to install it. How do you log in? It's like the cat you know It's a catch-22 because if you can't turn your machine on because the operating system is screwed up, not your drive, but the operating system.
20:28:58 Well, actually, I've had problems with an operating system being screwed up on Apple Silicon. And yes, you can still get in.
20:29:06 You have to then do a, there is a restore reboot.
20:29:10 Which I don't remember exactly how to do. Oh, you hold down the power key for several seconds and it's thing pops up and you can do restore from the recovery disk and then restore the operating system.
20:29:21 So that is a way to do that, which is also something I can't demonstrate over Zoom. This is something that has to be done in a life.
20:29:28 Oh, gotcha. So there is a way to restore the operating system.
20:29:29 Session. Yes.
20:29:34 Okay, thank you.
20:29:37 But because it's all on one ship and flash drives in general This drive here is a flash drive.
20:29:46 If this gets damaged, there's no way to reformat it. Because unlike a regular hard drive, a hard drive, there's a bunch of platters in here. Actually, this one, because it's really thin, doesn't have that many, but there are platters in here. They're magnetic discs.
20:30:02 With these concentric circles around him. And each of these circles holds the same amount of data. And obviously the ones on the inside are packed tighter than the ones on the outside.
20:30:13 When parts of the drive goes bad, the drive just skips over that.
20:30:17 But this is one chip. If this goes bad. It's dead.
20:30:25 And the nice thing is because there are fewer moving parts, there aren't any the likelihood that it goes bad is actually fairly reduced.
20:30:33 This thing, these drives move, the slower ones move at 3,200 RPMs, 3200 revolutions per minute. Faster ones get up to 7,200 or 10,000 RPMs.
20:30:48 If you take three and a half inches and you multiply that by pi and then you figure out how much that is.
20:30:56 This thing's going down the highway at a really fast rate if it was a wheel, it's just really trucking along.
20:31:03 So the way in which you you take care of damage is that it just bypasses that part of the drive But since this is one piece of electronics because it's one ship. If it goes bad, it's bad.
20:31:20 And also, if it goes bad. Even the FBI can't recover it because it's just one chip.
20:31:26 It's a problem. But it's also much more secure and it's much less likely to die in the first place.
20:31:37 I don't know if that was… enlightening or confusing.
20:31:48 It's… Half hour after our ending time.
20:31:53 I'm willing to ask for more if people have other questions and willing to entertain them, but I want to ask you to send me suggestions for what we do next time. There's still Apple utilities that we haven't talked about.
20:32:08 We can talk about a couple of utilities or if there's something else you want to talk about, send those suggestions in for what we do in May.
20:32:15 Was there no sign-in sheet for today?
20:32:17 There was, and I forgot to have everyone sign in. I have to remember where I stuck it.
20:32:26 And some of the people have already left. Ah.
20:32:31 And that's not going to do it.
20:32:52 And… I'm sorry. I'm just going to have to.
20:32:59 Not use the sign-in sheet because I can't find where I put it. I did make a sign-in sheet and I lost the link to it.
20:33:08 It's around here someplace. Sorry about that.
20:33:12 I told you I needed to have a… a checklist of what I needed to do and
20:33:19 I haven't done that yet.
20:33:24 One of my neighbors has a Tesla.
20:33:28 And the Tesla, they can start the Tesla with their phone. There's an app on the phone that starts the Tesla.
20:33:34 Yeah.
20:33:35 So they left their house and went downtown, came back and realized that they hadn't taken the keys.
20:33:41 With them because they didn't need it to drive the car They'd use their phone. Unfortunately, their phone does not unlock their car.
20:33:49 And they ended up with like a $400 bill for the locksmith to come out and She was saying that she was saying that She has many regrets for having the Tesla.
20:34:03 And now she has an additional one because of the $400 bill.
20:34:10 Yeah.
20:34:09 I have to admit…
20:34:15 Kathleen and I both have, we have a card that has a keyless entry, which you have the cards on you.
20:34:22 And I took Kathleen to the hospital one day And then I went out to get in the car and the car wouldn't let me in.
20:34:30 And that's because when I got in the car, I was not using my key for keyless entry. I was using Kathleen's and I didn't know that.
20:34:37 And since Kathleen was admitted to the hospital. I didn't have the key with me, so I had to go back in and had to wait for her to come out of the ER to beg the key so I could get in the car and drive it and
20:34:53 Everyone thought this was funny except me.
20:35:00 Technology is wonderful when it works. Any other questions?
20:35:03 Yeah.
20:35:07 Thank you again.
20:35:09 Okay, please write with suggestions on what we do for me.
20:35:14 Good night.
20:35:15 I have a request. When you get your windows machine Would you try using iCloud for Windows?
20:35:25 I do have a new Windows machine, as much to my regret.
20:35:29 And yeah, that sounds like a good idea. All right. Good night.
20:35:31 Okay. Thank you. All right. Good night.