Have you ever run into a situation where the battery icon in your menu bar is stuck at 80% even though your Mac has been plugged in for hours? Luckily, there are several easy workarounds, but first, let us explain what’s going on.

In the past few years, Apple has added optimized battery charging features to many of its battery-powered products, including the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. In all cases, Apple’s goal is to increase the lifespan of your devices’ lithium-ion batteries by reducing the amount of time they spend fully charged.

With the iPhone and Apple Watch, Apple achieves this by learning your charging patterns and delaying charging past 80% in certain situations. The optimized charging algorithm then charges the device to full just before you’re likely to unplug it. For most people, that probably happens overnight, so the device is ready in the morning.

With the MacBooks, the background is slightly different. Many people use their MacBooks at desks, often connected to large displays, so they spend a lot of time plugged into power. In the past, that would keep the battery fully charged and generate heat, both of which shorten the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries. So once again, Apple’s optimized battery charging technology tries to hold the battery at 80% and charges it to full only when it thinks you’ll need to use it away from the desk. If you seldom take it anywhere, it could be held at 80% most of the time.

That works best when you have a regular schedule, but it’s easy to end up in a situation where you need to grab your MacBook and head out—such as for an overnight trip—where you won’t be able to recharge easily. If the optimized battery charging algorithm wasn’t expecting that, you could find yourself with a battery that’s only at 80% to start, significantly reducing your battery life.

There are three ways to work around this problem, depending on how troublesome it is for you:

• Resume charging: If the optimized battery charging algorithm has paused charging at 80% but you want to leave with a full charge, click the battery icon in the menu bar and choose Charge to Full Now. That will take some time, so make sure you initiate the final charging early enough. This workaround is most helpful if you only occasionally need a full charge.
  
• Disable optimized battery charging temporarily: Let’s say you’re on that overnight trip and need to be sure that your MacBook is fully charged for your 6 AM flight home. To ensure you don’t wake up to a partially full battery, you can temporarily disable optimized battery charging. In macOS 13 Ventura, choose System Settings > Battery, click the ⓘ next to Battery Health, turn off the Optimized Battery Charging switch, and click Turn Off Until Tomorrow in the dialog that appears.
  
  In macOS 12 Monterey and earlier, choose System Preferences > Battery, deselect Optimized Battery Charging, and click Turn Off Until Tomorrow.
• Disable optimized battery charging permanently: Some people have unpredictable schedules. While the optimized battery charging algorithm may simply throw up its hands and allow your battery to charge fully at all times, if you find yourself continually fighting it, follow the steps above and click Turn Off to disable it permanently. Be aware that this may reduce the overall lifespan of your battery.

If all this seems fussy, it’s because Apple was criticized some years ago when it introduced optimized battery charging for the iPhone without informing users, some of whom were upset by the seemingly unpredictable charging behavior. Apple now makes the controls accessible to users, which is good but adds complexity.

Although we recommend leaving optimized battery charging enabled in most situations, there are times when it’s reasonable to turn it off to ensure you have as much power as possible for the upcoming work session.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Konev Timur)

In iOS 15, Apple added the Voice Isolation feature to FaceTime calls to filter out noise around you while you’re talking, which is a boon if you’re making a call in a loud space or outside environment. With the recently released iOS 16.4, Apple has now brought that feature to cellular calls as well, but it’s not an option in Settings > Phone, as you might expect. Instead, during a call, open Control Center by swiping down from the top right of the screen (Face ID iPhones) or up from the bottom (Touch ID iPhones). Then tap the Mic Mode button and Voice Isolation. You won’t hear any difference, but the person on the other end should be able to hear you better. iOS remembers your setting, so switch back to Standard when you’re done—Voice Isolation may not sound as good as Standard in quiet spaces.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Jub Job)

Photos we take today with our iPhones and other digital cameras automatically have metadata associated with them, information like time and date, camera type, lens and exposure information, and even location (with iPhones and newer cameras). Other metadata, like titles and faces, we have to add manually.

Four of these pieces of metadata are particularly useful:

• Dates ensure that photos sort correctly in Photos.
• Titles simplify searching and make it easier to group photos.
• Locations let you see photos on a map and search by location names.
• Faces collect images of individuals automatically after you identify some manually.

Problems crop up when you have old digital photos that lack full metadata and with scanned photos, which seldom have any metadata at all. The lack of metadata hits especially hard if you’ve taken advantage of a service that scans boxes of old snapshots so you have digital versions. Bulk scanning is a great way to protect the images and share them with others, but without appropriate metadata, the images can be nearly incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t already know who’s in them and when and where they were taken.

Happily, Photos has tools for adding metadata to multiple images at once. If you have a large collection of scanned photos, follow along to learn how to give them the metadata that will make them easier to find and understand in the future.

Before we get started, make sure you know how to select multiple images at once in Photos. There are four basic approaches:

• Drag: Click in any blank area, and drag a rectangle around the pictures you want to select. If you drag to the top or bottom of the screen, Photos scrolls to bring more images into view. Dragging is easy, but you can select more than you want.
• Shift-click: Select one picture. Then hold down the Shift key and click any other picture to select both of them and all the images in between. Shift-clicking is the fastest and most accurate way to select many contiguous photos.
• Command-click: To select an arbitrary set of photos, Command-click each one to select it; another Command-click on a selected image deselects it. Command-clicking is too slow for selecting a lot of photos, but it’s great for removing photos from the selected set if you’ve accidentally added too many with another method.
• Select All: If you want to select all the photos in an album, choose Edit > Select All.

Change Dates

Photos scanned by a service will likely come back with the date they were scanned. That’s not helpful, and while it’s hard to know exactly when the photos were taken, if you can get them in at least the correct year, they’ll sort reasonably in Photos. Once you’ve selected the photos you want to adjust, follow these steps:

1. Choose Image > Adjust Date & Time to bring up the Adjust dialog.
2. In the Adjusted field, enter the date you want to apply to the selected photos.
3. Click Adjust.
   

It’s important to note that this doesn’t change the date and time to what you enter exactly. Instead, it adjusts each photo’s date and time by the amount specified. In all likelihood, the selected photos have slightly different times and possibly dates, so adjusting them by the same amount means they’ll retain their basic order. In the screenshot above, you can see that each photo’s date will move more than 55 years into the past to when that tractor was newer.

Change Titles

No photos, scanned or taken with an iPhone, will automatically have useful title data assigned to them. At best, the title might be the same as the image’s filename, something unhelpful like IMG_3343.JPG. In Photos’ predecessor iPhoto, Apple provided a way of changing the titles of selected photos and appending a sequential number to each image. That way, you could have Niagara Falls Trip 1, Niagara Falls Trip 2, and so on.

That feature is no longer available in Photos. You can still change the titles of selected photos, but all the titles will be the same, without a sequential number. Once you’ve selected the desired images, follow these steps:

• Choose Window > Info to bring up an Info window.
• In the field labeled “Various Titles,” enter the desired title.
• Press Return to apply the title.
  

If you desperately want sequential numbers appended to your titles, there is a way of doing it using AppleScript, as explained in this discussion forum post.

Change Locations

Scanned photos and those taken with most digital cameras won’t have location metadata showing where the photo was taken. With many photos, you may not know the precise location—who remembers where that picnic in 1980 was held?—but you can probably specify the city or state/province. The process for adding locations is similar to adding titles.

1. Choose Window > Info to bring up an Info window.
2. In the field labeled Assign a Location, start typing the name of the location until you see the correct location appear in the suggestion list below.
3. Click the desired location to assign it to the selected photos.
   

If you want to do a lot of geotagging, check out the app HoudahGeo, which provides additional tools for connecting locations with images stored in Photos. It even lets you drag images to spots on a map, which may be faster than typing in locations.

Identify Faces

Though not perfect, the facial recognition feature in Photos is a wonder of modern machine learning. Once you identify someone a few times and then confirm or reject additional suggestions, Photos automatically identifies people as they appear in new photos. It could be particularly effective when importing a large number of old family photos where you might not recognize all the people in a previous generation. For help using facial recognition, refer to Apple’s Photos documentation, but here are the basics. The first task is to identify or create a new person whose face you want Photos to recognize:

1. In the Photos sidebar, click People, and look to see if the person has a thumbnail. If so, move on to the instructions for associating more photos with them.
2. If they don’t have a thumbnail, find a photo of them. If there’s an “unnamed” tag under their face, type their name in the box, selecting the appropriate suggestion if they’re among your contacts.
   
3. When there’s no tag under the person’s face, you’ll have to add one manually. Choose Window > Info to bring up the Info window, click the Add Faces button, click the image again (surprising, but necessary), drag the Click to Name circle over the face of the person to identify, and then type a name in the box.
   

Once you have identified or created a person for someone whose face you want, there are three ways to train Photos to identify more photos of them. These aren’t exclusive—you’ll want to employ all three. The first approach is generally pretty accurate, the second sometimes grasps at straws, and the third may kickstart more recognition by the other two later on.

• In the People album, double-click a person’s face. At the top of the window, Photos may display a banner saying that there are additional photos to review. If it does, click Review, and in the dialog that appears, deselect any photos that aren’t of the person before clicking Done. The banner won’t appear when there are no more photos to check for that person.
  
• In the People album, double-click a person’s face. Scroll to the bottom of the window, and click Confirm Additional Photos. If it has any photos that might be of that person, Photos displays the first one and asks at the top of the screen if the photo is of the desired person. Click Yes or No as appropriate for each photo that appears. Often, identifying a particular face as being associated with the person will add more photos. When you finish, click the Done button at the top of the window.
  
• Scroll through a bunch of photos individually, typing names into the “unnamed” box whenever possible. Those photos will immediately be associated with the person, but then you should leave Photos running in the background for hours or days so it can use that new information to identify more possible faces, which you may have to confirm using the previous two methods.

Identifying faces can be time-consuming, but it can also be somewhat addictive if you like feeling that you know more than the computer. Note that face metadata lives only in Photos itself, so if you were ever to export or share the photos with someone else, you’d have to find a way to convey who was pictured in another way.

With the tools in Photos to change dates, titles, locations, and faces, you can bring order to that large collection of scanned or old photos.

(Featured image by iStock.com/vgabusi)

Those who tend to cut things tight have a time-honored tradition of setting their watches ahead by a few minutes. That way, when you glance at your watch and realize that you need to leave, you actually have a few more minutes. You can do this with your Apple Watch, but only on the watch itself. Press the Digital Crown to see your apps, tap Settings, scroll down to and tap Clock, tap the button for Set Watch Face Display Time Ahead, and use the Digital Crown to choose your desired time adjustment. Note that this setting affects only the time you see on the watch face. All alarms and notifications will come in at the correct times.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Bobex-73)

It’s a question as old as the personal computer. When should you replace your current Mac with a new model that’s faster and more capable? If money were no object, the answer would be easy—whenever you feel like it. For the rest of us, and particularly for organizations with multiple Macs and limited budgets, the question is harder to answer. But answer it we must because most of us can’t do our jobs without a Mac.

Let’s first look at some of the things that might encourage you to upgrade:

• Performance and resale value: Many companies and large organizations swap out their Macs every 3 to 5 years. That’s considered the sweet spot where performance starts to decline, but resale value remains relatively high. Plus, Macs of that age start to have more problems that may require repair, resulting in lost productivity due to downtime.
• Hardware limitations: At some point, you might feel your Mac is too slow—you’re seeing the spinning beachball frequently, or tasks are taking too long to complete. Another common concern crops up when you frequently have to shuffle files around to deal with low disk space on the startup drive. Or perhaps the battery life of a Mac laptop isn’t always sufficient for your needs—losing hours of productivity while on an airplane without seat power can be problematic.
• macOS support: Although there’s no requirement that you run the latest version of macOS, being unable to upgrade is a hint that your Mac is getting older. Apple provides security updates for the two versions of macOS before the current one, so if your Mac can’t stay within that update circle, it will become more vulnerable to security exploits.
• Physical damage: Macs are fairly durable, which often keeps them running even when the screen is cracked, a key sticks sometimes, or the case has been dented. The more damage your Mac has, the more likely it is that something else will go wrong, potentially at an inconvenient time.
• General flakiness: It’s hard to quantify this, but an older Mac might start to feel slow, crash more often, or act weirdly. Sometimes those problems can be resolved by reinstalling macOS and apps from scratch, but that’s a lot of work and far from guaranteed.

• Repair support: Apple guarantees that it will provide parts and service for all products within 5 years of when Apple last distributed them for sale. After that, Apple considers the products “vintage” for the next 2 years and will repair them subject to parts availability. Apple considers products pulled from the market more than 7 years before to be “obsolete” and won’t repair them apart from Mac laptops that are eligible for an additional battery-only repair period.
• Shiny new Mac: Sometimes, it’s easy to delay a new Mac purchase because none of the Macs seem quite right. At other times, however, the exact Mac you want will be released just when you need it, making for an easy decision.

With those variables in mind, let us offer recommendations for different audiences:

• Large-fleet organizations: It’s probably not worth the time to consider the needs of every employee in the context of what Mac they have. Instead, create a policy for replacing Macs on a 3- to-5-year schedule you can build into your annual budget. When it’s time to replace a particular Mac, swap it out for a comparable new model and send the old one to a resale organization.
• Small-fleet organizations: For companies and nonprofits with a smaller number of Macs and a smaller budget, stick with the same 3- to 5-year schedule, but instead of automatically replacing each Mac as its number comes up, use it as an opportunity to evaluate the user’s needs and then either replace the Mac or set the next evaluation date. You may end up replacing Macs slightly less often, perhaps every 4 to 6 years. It’s also more likely that old Macs will be handed down rather than resold.
• Creatives and freelancers: If you live and die by the work you can accomplish on your Mac, pay regular attention to whether your Mac is meeting your needs. You’ll probably start to notice issues in 3 to 5 years, and as soon as you do, start watching Apple’s releases to see what new Mac might be the best replacement. Also, consider saving a small amount per month with the idea that you’ll have enough to buy your new Mac about the time the old one noticeably starts to cut into your productivity.
• Home users: As long as the Mac meets your needs and can run a version of macOS that’s receiving security updates, there’s no harm in continuing to use it for 8 years or more. However, if it starts to need hardware repairs and repeated consultant visits, that’s an indication that you should spend the money on a new Mac instead. Once it can no longer run a supported version of macOS, it’s time for a replacement.
• Fixed budgets: We get it—sometimes there’s no money for a new Mac. Assuming you can accomplish what you need to do and avoid sketchy parts of the Internet, go ahead and run your current Mac into the ground. It could last 10 years or more. And when it comes time to replace it, there’s no shame in looking to the used market—all those Macs that others are replacing often come up for sale at bargain prices.

We hope this has given you some structure for thinking about replacing Macs, whether you’re worried about the Mac on your desk or all those in the entire design department. And, of course, feel free to contact us for help putting together a replacement schedule.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Prykhodov)

Sometimes apps can be too helpful. Apple’s Mail on the Mac likes to turn pasted URLs into graphically rich previews, and sometimes that’s OK. But other times, the preview is confusing or takes up too much space. Or you may want to send a plain link so the recipient can see its text. There are three ways to avoid rich link previews:

• Before pasting a URL into your message, type a space or any other text. Mail converts URLs to rich previews only when they’re on a line by themselves.
• Hover over the preview, click the down-pointing arrow that appears, and choose Convert to Plain Link from the pop-up menu.
• In Mail > Settings > Composing, change the Message Format pop-up menu to Plain Text. Although this eliminates rich link previews, it also prevents you from including formatting and images.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

No one intends to drop their iPhone in a pool or fall off a boat with their iPhone in a pocket. But accidents happen. Happily, Apple has designed the iPhone with significant levels of splash and water resistance, so brief exposure to rain or even a quick dunk might not cause any problems. If your iPhone does get wet, follow our advice below to dry it out before calling for more help.

How Waterproof Is Your Phone?

First, you’ll want to understand what you should worry about, which boils down to your phone’s IP rating and its age. All iPhones have an IP—Ingress Protection—rating that specifies what they should be able to handle when new. Current and recent iPhone models are rated at IP68, with the older iPhone 7, 8, XR, and second-generation SE models rated at IP67. The first digit specifies the protection against solid objects like dust, and the second against water. A rating of 6 for the first digit means the device is dust-tight—no dust can get in. For the second digit:

• 7 means the device is protected against the effects of temporary immersion in water under standardized conditions of time and pressure.
• 8 means the device is protected against the effects of continuous immersion in water. The conditions under which this rating is awarded are specified by the manufacturer but must be more severe than rating 7.

Apple has been improving the water resistance of iPhones. The iPhone 11, XS, and XS Max are designed to withstand immersion at a maximum depth of 2 meters for up to 30 minutes. The iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max increase the depth to 4 meters, and every newer model can handle the increased pressure of up to 6 meters. In other words, all should be able to survive a brief dip.

Don’t get complacent about that old iPhone XS, though. Water resistance isn’t a permanent condition. It depends on tight seals and gaskets that are weakened by age, drops, disassembly, extreme hot or cold temperatures, and exposure to chemicals (like insect repellent and sunscreen). The older your iPhone is, the less likely it is to meet the criteria of its IP rating.

Dealing with Splashes, Spills, and Submersion

Enough theory! What should you do if your iPhone gets wet? It depends on how wet it got. For instance, if you have to use your iPhone in the rain, it’s difficult to keep raindrops off the screen and case. They shouldn’t pose a problem; just dry the iPhone off with a cloth. However, if you accidentally tip over your coffee on your iPhone, first rinse the affected area with tap water. Then dry it off with a cloth. In both cases, we recommend not plugging in a Lightning cable until it’s had more time to dry out.

More concerning is when your iPhone takes a plunge. Despite the IP rating suggesting it can withstand up to 30 minutes of immersion, try to get it out of the water as quickly as possible. Then there are some dos and don’ts.

Do:

• Do turn it off immediately with the power slider that appears when you hold the side button and either volume button (Face ID iPhones) or the side button (Touch ID iPhones).
• Do rinse it under tap water if you dropped it in a muddy puddle (dirt and other contaminants), the ocean (salt water), a swimming pool (chlorinated water), or a toilet (ick)—basically anything other than clean, fresh water.
• Do dry the exterior with a soft cloth.
• Do remove excess liquid by tapping it gently against your hand with the Lightning port and speaker facing down.
• Do open the SIM tray and leave the iPhone in a dry area with airflow. If possible, direct a fan at the openings.
• Do leave it turned off and let it dry for at least 5 hours and up to 24 hours.

Don’t:

• Don’t attempt to dry the iPhone with a hair dryer, any heat source, or compressed air.
• Don’t insert anything like a cotton swab or tissue into the Lightning connector or SIM tray. Let any water inside evaporate.
• Don’t connect a charging cable or any other cable until the iPhone is completely dry. Recent iPhones will warn if they detect water in the Lightning port. If you see that warning, Apple recommends waiting at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours before trying again. (Wireless charging should be fine, but seriously, just leave the iPhone alone to dry.)
  

Bonus Techniques

There are two additional techniques you can try, one to remove water in general and another to clear water from the iPhone’s speaker.

First, the classic advice for a water-damaged electronic device is to bury it in a container of uncooked rice for a day or two. The idea is that the rice absorbs the moisture in its vicinity, pulling it out of the iPhone. It can work, but Apple recommends against it because of the likelihood of getting tiny bits of rice in the Lightning port. If you want to use rice, wrap the iPhone loosely in a paper towel first to protect its ports.

A better approach is to use a sealed plastic bag containing silica gel desiccant packets like those in vitamin bottles. They’re inexpensive and readily available, and you can even get ones that you can recharge in a microwave or oven. But of course, you have to have them on hand, or it’s back to the rice.

Second, if your iPhone’s speaker sounds muffled, some people suggest using an Apple Watch-like trick of playing a particular sound to eject water. Visit FixMySpeakers and tap the button. This is clever and shouldn’t hurt anything, but if there’s water in the speakers, there’s probably water elsewhere, and it might be safer to turn the iPhone off quickly and let it dry naturally—as I recommend above.

One last piece of advice: Apple doesn’t claim any sort of water resistance for iPads or MacBooks. If one of them gets wet, you can try following the advice above—it shouldn’t hurt anything—but it’s more likely that a repair is in your future.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Evgen_Prozhyrko)

Apple has at long last released the promised Apple Music Classical app. It’s a free iPhone app for Apple Music subscribers that looks and works much like the standard Music app. However, Apple has adjusted it extensively under the hood to work better with classical music, where there are many recordings of the same work by different artists. Apple also improved the metadata—normalizing composer names and adding work and movement tags—for the 5 million classical tracks in Apple Music. For instance, you can search by work, composer, conductor, opus number, and key, something that worked poorly before. Apple Music Classical is a significant improvement for classical music fans, and it provides expert recommendations and playlists for those interested in getting started. Alas, there’s no Mac version yet, and the iPad is limited to using the scaled-up iPhone app.

(Featured image by iStock.com/cyano66)

Many businesses, schools, and other organizations have adopted cloud storage services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive for excellent reasons. Cloud storage provides a centralized spot for shared data without the up-front cost or maintenance issues of a network-attached storage device. It also allows individuals to access the same files on multiple devices and significantly enhances collaboration by allowing multiple people to work on the same file.

All cloud storage services provide a simple Web-based interface that’s the least common denominator. The Web interfaces look and work the same for everyone, regardless of platform. Unfortunately, they’re clumsier—sometimes much more so— than working with the same files in the Mac’s Finder.

Luckily, cloud storage services also provide deep integration with the Finder. If you haven’t already installed your cloud storage service’s Mac app, we strongly encourage you to do so. Here are links for the big four; others will likely provide similar apps.

• Box Drive
• Dropbox
• Google Drive for Desktop
• OneDrive for Mac

Once the software is installed, you’ll find an item in the Locations portion of your Finder window sidebar that provides access to everything in your cloud storage, as though it were on an external hard drive connected to your Mac. You can quickly rename files, add folders, move files between folders, and perform other basic Finder tasks. The services also install menu bar items you can click to access settings, activity, and other controls (Dropbox shown below).

Cloud storage is not the same as an external hard drive, of course, so you need to keep certain facts in mind when using cloud-based data in the Finder. Some of this information has changed within the last few months, as cloud storage providers have migrated from Apple-deprecated custom kernel extensions to Apple’s recommended File Provider extension. (The migration is still underway for Dropbox users.) Here are the most important things to know.

Data May or May Not Be Stored on Your Mac’s Drive

When integrating a cloud storage service into the Finder, it’s reasonable to ask where the data is actually stored. The short answer is that it’s always stored online, but it might also be stored on your Mac. All cloud-based files are either online-only, at which point all you see is a placeholder icon on your Mac, or offline, which means a copy of the files exists on your Mac. Online-only files and folders have a little cloud icon next to their names in the Finder; offline files lack that icon.

When you double-click an online-only file, the service’s Mac software downloads it in the background so it can open in the appropriate app. You shouldn’t notice a delay with small files, although it may become more noticeable with very large files or over slow Internet connections. And, of course, if you’re on an airplane or somewhere without connectivity, you can’t open online-only files at all. On the plus side, they don’t take up any space on your Mac’s drive until you open them.

You can control which files and folders are online-only and which are offline. Control-click the file or folder and look for commands like Download Now or Make Available Offline to bring its contents down to your Mac, or use commands like Remove Download or Make Online-Only to remove the download to save space.

All Your Files Live In ~/Library/CloudStorage

So where are the offline copies of cloud-based files stored on your Mac? It may seem like they’re on a drive of their own, but in reality, they’re stored in your home folder’s hidden Library folder, in a folder called CloudStorage. (To see the Library folder, open the Finder’s Go menu and press Option.) You never have to go there directly, but it can be useful to keep in mind when setting up backups, moving data between Macs, and more.

Only OneDrive Supports External Drives

There is an important caveat to the requirement that all cloud-based files live in ~/Library/CloudStorage. That folder lives on your Mac’s internal drive, which may not have sufficient space to store offline copies of all your cloud-based data. Before the switch to Apple’s File Provider extension, the cloud storage services let you store the offline copies of your files on an external hard drive. That’s no longer possible with Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Microsoft OneDrive has worked around this limitation, allowing you to specify an external drive as your cache to maintain a copy of offline data separately from the state of the items in the CloudStorage folder. (If you manage terabytes of offline files, particularly for audio or video editing work, check out the completely different LucidLink service.)

Dragging Files Moves Rather than Copies

When you work with an external hard drive or network drive, dragging a file from your Mac’s internal drive to one of those copies it because it’s going to a different volume. Although the cloud storage services seem to be separate volumes (some were in the past), they no longer act that way. That’s because all the data lives in the CloudStorage folder on your internal drive, so dragging a file out of Google Drive, say, moves it, just as though you dragged a file from one folder on your internal drive to another. It’s not a problem—and the services warn you about it—but keep it in mind.

Moved or Trashed Files Remain Available Online, at Least Temporarily

What happens to the online version of a file when you move it from the cloud storage service on your Mac to another location on your Mac’s internal drive? Good question, and the answer is that it ends up in the trash equivalent on the service’s website. Cloud storage services generally retain such files for some time—30 days is common—after which they go away for good.

When you delete a cloud-based file in the Finder, the same thing happens: it ends up in the service’s online trash equivalent. However, what happens on your Mac varies by service, so testing with a sacrificial file is worthwhile. For example, if you delete an offline file in Dropbox, it moves to the Mac’s Trash. However, if you delete an online-only file, Dropbox warns you that it will be deleted immediately, and it disappears instantly from the Mac rather than moving to the Trash. You can still find it in Dropbox’s Deleted Files folder on the Dropbox website. In contrast, deleting either type of file from Google Drive moves it to the Mac’s Trash (and puts it in Google Drive’s online Trash folder).

Sharing Files and Paths with Colleagues

All the cloud storage services let you Control-click a file and copy a link. When a co-worker clicks that link, it will open in the cloud storage service’s Web interface or possibly in an online version of the app that created it. That may be fine, but our experience is that they won’t be able to find the file again in the future.

To help colleagues learn where files are in a shared cloud-based folder structure, send them the path to the file—the full list of folders containing the file. The trick for getting it is to select the file in the Finder, Option-click the Edit menu, and choose Copy “MyFile” as Pathname.

The start of the path is specific to your Mac, so delete that and leave the rest. For instance, when you paste the path, if you get this:

/Users/foobar/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-foobar@example.com/My Drive/GroupShared/Buzz/Posts/Buzz-0004.pdf

Trim it as follows to clarify that the file is in the Posts folder, which is in the Buzz folder, and that’s in  a top-level folder called GroupShared:

/GroupShared/Buzz/Posts/Buzz-0004.pdf

Searches May Work Poorly for Online-Only Content

The split between online-only and offline files also affects how Spotlight and other content-based searches work. As you would imagine, if a file is online-only, there’s no way Spotlight can index its content, so Spotlight won’t be able to find such files based on content searches. Some of the cloud storage services offer content-based searches, so with Google Drive, for instance, if you initiate a search from its Web interface, it will find all files containing the search terms even when they’re set to online-only on your Mac.

Filename searches in Finder windows should work regardless of online-only/offline state, although we’ve experienced problems when trying to limit the scope within the service’s Mac folder—search the This Mac scope for the best results. (Click the This Mac button after starting the search if necessary.) You may also have good luck with third-party search utilities like EasyFind and Find Any File.

Backups Work Only for Offline Content

Finally, remember that Mac backup systems like Time Machine and Backblaze cannot back up online-only files because they don’t actually exist on your drive. At best, such backup apps will show the placeholder for the file but won’t back up its content. They work fine for offline files, of course, but if you have to find a particular file or folder when restoring, remember that backup apps other than Time Machine will probably see it as stored in ~/Library/CloudStorage.

Should you care if your cloud-based files are backed up locally? Cloud storage systems automatically protect data against drive failure or other problems in the cloud. Plus, any shared data that one of your collaborators deletes from their Mac—inadvertently or maliciously—should be maintained in that person’s online trash, even if it seems to disappear.

However, we’d argue that it’s all too easy to lose or corrupt cloud-based data such that you want a local backup. We’ve seen too many situations where cloud-based files went missing or had problems. In those cases, a local backup provided an essential fallback or welcome peace of mind.

To ensure that your cloud-based files are backed up alongside your other files, you must make sure they’re stored offline long enough to get into your backups. Select top-level folders, make them offline, and wait until everything has downloaded and been backed up. If you need the space back, you can return some folders to being online-only. Pay attention to new files added by other devices or people since they may be online-only by default and thus fail to be included in your backups.

For backup of an organizational cloud storage account, it might make more sense to use a service like Backupify, CloudAlly, or CubeBackup, or to rely on something like a Synology NAS device with Cloud Sync. But that’s a topic for another day or another discussion—get in touch to learn more.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Galeanu Mihai)

The Mac’s Desktop is a remarkably useful place. It’s a good spot for in-progress documents, screenshots, images dragged out of Web pages, and more. However, app windows tend to obscure the Desktop, making it harder to use. There are two quick ways you can temporarily hide windows, making it easy to access icons on the Desktop. In macOS 13 Ventura, in System Settings > Desktop & Dock, click the Shortcuts button at the bottom and assign a keyboard shortcut to Show Desktop (we like the Right Option key). Or click Hot Corners and choose Desktop for one of the corners. (In macOS 12 Monterey and earlier, look in System Preferences > Mission Control.) Then, press that keyboard shortcut or put your pointer in that corner to move your windows aside temporarily. When you’re done, press the key or move the pointer there again to put the windows back.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/AmnajKhetsamtip)

Social Media: The Mac’s Desktop is a great place for in-progress documents, screenshots, and other things you’re working on, but only if you can get to it easily. Read on for two little-known tricks for temporarily pushing windows aside.