As much as we hate to admit it, when it comes to losing data, the question is not “if,” but “when.” If you rely on your Mac for your job, or if your Mac contains valuable information—and whose Mac doesn’t have at least irreplaceable photos?—you must back up regularly or risk data loss. Seriously, full backups of your entire Mac are not optional.

Backups protect your data and help you get back to work more quickly if your Mac is lost, stolen, dropped on the floor, caught in a fire, soaked by a broken pipe, or compromised by malicious hackers. They also save the day if your external drive goes south, if an important file develops corruption, and even when you make a mistake and delete essential data from a file without realizing until Undo can no longer help.

It’s important to think through your backup strategy. Don’t assume that a single backup to a hard drive on your desk is good enough—it’s not because a fire or flood will likely damage any backup hardware attached to your Mac. Another common error is not realizing that if you rely on your Mac to get your work done, you may not want to wait as long as it will take to restore from certain types of backups. Our triple-play strategy will help you avoid these problems.

Backup #1: Time Machine

Apple has been making backups easier since 2007 by providing the Time Machine backup software with the Mac. Set it up with an external drive and it will cheerfully create versioned backups, which contain multiple copies of each file as it changes over time. With versioned backups, you can restore a lost or damaged file to its most recent state, or to any previous state. That’s essential if corruption crept in unnoticed and you’ve been backing up a corrupt file for some time. Time Machine also enables you to restore an entire drive as of the latest backup, which you might do if you have to reformat or replace your drive.

Time Machine backups, useful as they are, can’t help you in two situations:

• If your Mac’s main drive dies, but you need to keep working in order to meet a deadline, you won’t want to wait for hours while you reformat and restore—or longer if you must first install a new drive. To keep working with minimal interruption, you need a bootable duplicate, which is an exact clone of your drive.
• Should you be so unlucky as to experience a burglary, fire, or flood that affects your Mac, it’s likely that your Time Machine drive—and your bootable duplicate—will suffer the same fate and thus be useless as a backup. To protect against that unhappy possibility, you need an offsite backup.

Backup #2: Bootable Duplicate

If you don’t have time to deal with a dead startup drive until you meet a deadline, you can work from your bootable duplicate instead. To make one, you need an external drive that’s as large as your Mac’s internal drive, or at least a good bit bigger than the amount of data on your drive. If you have a really large drive, you could partition it in Disk Utility and use one partition for Time Machine and the other for a bootable duplicate.

You also need backup software that can create a bootable duplicate. The leading contenders are Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.99) and SuperDuper! ($27.95). Both are easy to set up and can update your bootable duplicate reliably on a regular schedule—nightly is best.

Backup #3: Offsite Backup

If disaster strikes both your Mac and its attached backup drive, you’ll be ecstatic that you stored a backup elsewhere. When it comes to offsite backups, you have two basic choices:

• Set up two or three backup drives with Time Machine, or with Time Machine and a bootable duplicate on separate partitions, and store one of them in another location, such as a trusted friend’s house or your office across town. A safe deposit box also works well. (If you’re storing it where someone else could access it, make sure to encrypt the Time Machine backup and use FileVault to protect the bootable duplicate’s contents.) Then, on a regular basis, swap the drives such that you’re backing up to one, and keeping another off-site.
• Use a cloud backup service, which you can back up to and restore from over the Internet. The two leading services with good Mac apps are Backblaze and CrashPlan. Plans for both start at about $5 per month or $50 per year for one computer. These apps back up constantly in the background, so you’re always protected. Their main downside is that they’re slow in both directions, but in the event of a four-alarm fire that melts your Mac, retrieving your data slowly is better than not getting it back at all.

So there you have it. Use Time Machine for continual protection of your data, a bootable duplicate so you can return to work quickly if your drive dies, and an offsite backup in case of catastrophe. If you have questions or want hands-on help setting up a sensible backup system, just contact me.

If your Mac resembles an absent-minded professor’s office with files and folders strewn hither and thither, getting to the right spot to open or save a file may have become slow and clumsy. Sure, in an ideal world, you’d organize everything perfectly, but you’d also be flossing twice a day, calling your mother every Sunday, and eating more leafy greens. So let’s talk about a shortcut that lets you put off that big reorg for another day: the sidebar that graces every Finder window and Open/Save dialog.

First, make sure it’s showing. In the Finder, with a Finder window active, if the View menu has a Show Sidebar command, choose it. (If it says Hide Sidebar, the sidebar is already showing.) Or, when you’re in an Open dialog, click the sidebar  button in the dialog’s toolbar to show and hide the sidebar.

Now, to make the best use of the sidebar, try these tips:

• By default, the sidebar shows a lot of items you likely don’t use. Turn off anything extra to make the sidebar shorter and more useful. Choose Finder > Preferences > Sidebar to see four categories of sidebar items. Favorites generally holds folders, Shared items are networked computers and servers, Devices are hard drives and other storage devices, and Tags displays recently used Finder tags. Be ruthless here and uncheck anything that you seldom use or don’t understand.
  
• To make the sidebar more manageable temporarily, hover the pointer over a category label in the sidebar and click Hide when it appears. That category’s contents disappear, making what’s still in the sidebar easier to focus on; to get them back, hover over the label again and click Show.
  
  

• Add your own frequently used folders to the Favorites category so you have one-click access to them in the Finder and when opening or saving files. Drag a folder from the Finder to the Favorites list to add it. The folder remains on your disk in the original location, but if you click it in the sidebar, its contents appear instantly in the Finder window.

• Don’t be shy about adding and removing folders; there’s no harm in adding a folder for a few days while you’re working on a project, and then removing it when you’re done. To remove a folder, Control-click it and choose Remove from Sidebar. The folder disappears from the sidebar but stays on your disk.
  
  

• Organize your favorites so they’re in an order that makes sense to you, whether that’s alphabetical or the most important at the top. To do this, simply drag them to rearrange.
  
• Once you’ve set up your sidebar, make sure you use it! In the Finder, to open files, click a folder in the sidebar to display its contents. You can even drag files from one folder into another folder in the sidebar to move them—or Option-drag to copy them.
  
• When you’re in an app and want to open a file, choose File > Open, and in the Open dialog, click sidebar items to jump directly to those folders. The same goes when saving a new file; choose File > Save and use your sidebar to navigate to the desired location.

Put these tips into play on your Mac, and you’ll be teleporting between far-flung folders in no time!

Just as you wouldn’t leave your pooch in a car parked in the sun, you should be careful with your iPhone. It’s rated for use at up to 95℉ (35℃) and can be stored at up to 113℉ (45℃), but temperatures inside a parked car on a sunny day can exceed 130℉ (55℃) within 30–60 minutes. That can both temporarily disable your iPhone and damage the battery more permanently. If your iPhone gets too hot, it warns you, “iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it.” It also stops charging, dims or turns off the display, puts its radios in a low-power state and disables the camera flash, although audible turn-by-turn directions will continue. Turn it off and let it chill out for a while.

The Camera app on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch can take three kinds of video and three types of photos, and the interface suggests that you switch between them by tapping or swiping on the labels below the viewfinder. Unfortunately, those labels are small and can be difficult to swipe accurately. If you’ve found moving between modes frustrating, try swiping left or right on the entire viewfinder, which has the same effect as swiping on the labels but with a much larger swipe area. And, if your Camera app occasionally takes an unexpected type of photo, an errant swipe could explain it.

Do you use Safari and love keyboard shortcuts, like me? In 2015, Apple quietly changed the behavior of the Command-1 through Command-9 keys in Safari on the Mac. Before then, pressing Command-1 would open the first bookmark on your Favorites bar. Now, however, Command-1 switches to the first tab, Command-2 opens the second tab, and so on. If that’s not how you want to work, choose Safari > Preferences > Tabs and deselect “Use ⌘-1 through ⌘-9 to switch tabs.” From then on, Command-1 through Command-9 will once again open bookmarks. Regardless of which behavior you prefer, you can reverse it on any invocation with the Option key, so if you set Command-1 to open your first bookmark, Command-Option-1 switches to the first tab.

Using Messages on the Mac or in iOS is pretty easy. Start a new conversation, enter someone’s phone number or email address, and start chatting. And if you want to talk with several people at once, type a couple of phone numbers or email addresses when you begin.

What you may not realize is that if everyone in your group is using an Apple device and iMessage—this is the case if your messages to them appear in blue bubbles—extra features become available when you click or tap the Details button in the upper-right corner of Messages. Did you know that:

• You can give the conversation a name that’s more descriptive than the truncated names of the people in the conversation. On the Mac, type in the Name field at the top; in iOS, tap in Enter a Group Name and then type.
• At any time, you can add more people to the conversation; click Add Member (Mac) or tap Add Contact (iOS) and type the desired phone number or email address.
• You can remove people from the conversation. On the Mac, click the person’s name and press Delete; in iOS, swipe left on a name and tap Delete. Be careful since there’s no opportunity to confirm the deletion, so you’d have to add any mistakenly deleted people back manually. (In iOS, Messages doesn’t always let you remove people.)
• You can even “delete” yourself by clicking or tapping Leave This Conversation at the bottom of the Details screen. Once you’ve left, you can’t get back in without someone else adding you.
• Is leaving a little drastic? Perhaps the conversation is being too chatty while you need to get work done. To mute notifications from the conversation, enable the Do Not Disturb option; disable it when you’re ready to be alerted to new messages again.
• Everyone in the conversation can send or share their location from an iPhone or iPad. Sending a location is like posting a message saying “I’m at the library now” along with a map to where you are. Sharing your location allows the others to see where you are at all times, for one hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely. Of course, if you opt to share indefinitely, you can revoke that sharing later.
• When anyone in the conversation is sharing their location, a map appears at the top, showing the locations of those who have shared. This is fabulous for keeping track of relatives during family reunions where different groups head out on separate outings.
• Finally, the bottom of the Details screen displays all the pictures that people have shared within the conversation. Messages gives you control over these images, letting you copy, save, open, and delete them. It’s all easy; on the Mac, select photos and Control/right-click to see a contextual menu that includes an Add to Photos Library command or press the Space bar to invoke Quick Look for a bigger view and a Share option. In iOS, touch and hold on a photo to see additional options—tap Save to copy the image to the Photos app.

Alas, if you include even one green-bubble friend who doesn’t have an iPhone with an iMessage account set up and instead relies on plain old SMS text messaging, these features disappear. It’s just another way Apple encourages your friends and relatives to use iPhones.

Since 2013, we’ve been able to use handheld electronic devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle at pretty much all times during airplane flights, including takeoff and landing. That was a big change from previous policy, which banned the use of personal electronic devices below 10,000 feet, forcing passengers to occupy themselves with books and magazines at the start and end of flights.

But now flight attendants ask us to put our devices into “airplane mode.” You probably know how to do this on your iOS device, but if not, here’s how. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up Control Center and tap the airplane button at the top left. Alternatively, you can open the Settings app and enable the Airplane Mode switch (it’s the first switch in the list). When you land, use the same controls to turn it off again.

What does airplane mode do? It disables certain wireless features of your device. Specifically, it turns off the cellular voice and data features of your iPhone or iPad, and on all iOS devices it turns off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. However, only the cellular features are important to your airline—you can re-enable both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth at any time. That might be useful if you want to use the airplane’s Wi-Fi network for Internet access (usually for a fee) or Bluetooth to play music over wireless headphones.

To turn these wireless features back on, tap the grayed-out Wi-Fi and Bluetooth buttons in Control Center, or flip their switches in Settings > Wi-Fi and Settings > Bluetooth. Don’t bother turning them on unless you’re going to use them, though, since you’ll save a little battery life by leaving them off for the duration of a long flight.

Why do the airlines care about cellular? It has little to do with airplane safety; the prohibition originated from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, not the Federal Aviation Administration. The reason is that fast-moving cell phones used high in the air may light up many cell towers at once, which can confuse the mobile phone network.

The technical solution is akin to what the airlines do to provide Internet access now; a device called a “picocell” would be installed on the airplane to provide connectivity with the phone network, and cell phones on the plane would communicate with it instead of individual cell towers on the ground below. Will it happen, though?

In the past, there have been proposals to allow cell phone use on properly equipped planes. However, the thought of fellow passengers having non-stop phone conversations during flight fills many people with dread. Many lawmakers in the United States oppose allowing passengers to make and receive phone calls during flight, citing concerns about cabin safety, a worry echoed by the flight attendants union. Even former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler acknowledged this, saying “I get it. I don’t want the person in the seat next to me yapping at 35,000 feet any more than anyone else.” So don’t expect that rule to change.

If you’re allowed to use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, why do the airlines make you stow your MacBook Air during takeoff and landing? It has nothing to do with the technology—the airlines ban laptops during times when there could be an emergency landing because they could, like carry-on luggage or lowered tray tables, impede evacuation.

Ever wanted to jump to a particular folder on your Mac while opening or saving a file? You can, thanks to a clever Finder trick. Whenever you have an Open or Save dialog open in an app, switch to the Finder, find the folder you want to access, and drag its icon into the dialog. Presto—instant navigation to that folder! This trick even works if you drag the proxy icon—the little icon in the title bar of any window—for any folder.

It’s easy to take lots of photos on vacation these days, and while a slideshow of all of them is a bit much, friends and relatives might like to see a Best Of collection. Or you might wish to share baby photos with your family or pictures of your new city with friends back home.

With iCloud, it’s easy to create a shared album and to invite other iCloud users to subscribe to it (handy for viewing on an iOS device or Apple TV). It’s also easy to create a public Web page of photos that anyone can see, even if they don’t use any Apple devices.

First, some setup:

• If you’re using an iOS device, go to Settings > Photos & Camera, scroll down if needed, and turn on the iCloud Photo Sharing (not iCloud Photo Library!) switch.
• On a Mac, open System Preferences > iCloud, click the Options button next to Photos, select iCloud Photo Sharing, and click the Done button. 

  
  

Next, follow these steps, which are similar regardless of the device you’re using:

1. In the Photos app, select some photos or videos. In iOS, that involves tapping Select before tapping the items to select; on the Mac, Command-click the items you want or drag a selection rectangle around them.
2. Hit the Share  button and pick iCloud Photo Sharing.
3. Select an existing album, or create a new shared album (in iOS, tap Shared Album to see the New Shared Album command).
4. For a new album, provide an album name, enter the names or email addresses of any iCloud users with whom you want to share the album, and add an optional comment. In iOS, tap Post; on the Mac, click Create.

To add more photos, you could repeat the steps to select photos and then add them to the shared album. But it may be easier to start with the shared album:

• In Photos for iOS, if necessary, back out of the view until you see the Shared button at the bottom of the screen. Tap Shared and then the name of shared album. Then tap the + button in the bottom-right corner of the photo grid, select the items to add, tap Done, enter an optional comment, and tap Post.
• In Photos for the Mac, just drag photos into the shared album in the sidebar, under Shared. Or select the shared album in the Shared category, click “Add photos and videos” (near the upper right), select the items to add, and click the Add button.

It’s easy to tweak the options for your shared album or to create a public Web page for it. The process is similar in both operating systems:

• In Photos for iOS, tap Shared at the bottom of the screen and select the shared album. Tap People to bring up a screen where you can share the album with more people, control whether subscribers can post their own photos, create a public Web page, enable notifications, and delete the album entirely. To share the URL to the public Web page, tap Share Link and select a sharing method. 

  

• In Photos for the Mac, select the shared album in the sidebar, and then click the People  button in the toolbar. From the popover that appears, you can do the same things as in iOS, although sharing the link is best done by either clicking it to visit it in a Web browser and copying from there or Control-clicking it in Photos and choosing Copy Link from the contextual menu.

After practicing these steps a few times, you’ll be able to create shared albums in a flash, and share them easily!

Now that Apple has released a public beta of iOS 11, we have confirmation that Apple is kicking some old apps off the back of the train. If you’ve been using an iPhone or iPad for more than a few years, it’s possible that some of your apps won’t even launch in iOS 11. Here’s what’s going to happen, and what you can do about it.

Through the iPhone 5, fourth-generation iPad, original iPad mini, and fifth-generation iPod touch, Apple used 32-bit processors. However, in 2013, Apple instead began putting 64-bit chips in all new iOS devices. The company encouraged developers to make their apps run in 64-bit mode but kept iOS 7 compatible with older 32-bit apps. Starting in 2015, Apple required apps to run in 64-bit mode to receive App Store approval. And iOS 10 initially warned that 32-bit apps might slow down your device and later said that 32-bit apps would need to be updated.

First off, don’t worry about what 32-bit and 64-bit mean—all you need to know is that 32-bit apps are old and won’t run in iOS 11, and that 64-bit apps will continue to work as they always have.

How do you know which of your apps are 32-bit? For apps that you use regularly, you’ve probably seen one of those warnings. But other apps you may open only occasionally—how can you figure out which of those are destined for the chopping block?

In iOS 10.3, Apple added a feature to call out these apps. Navigate to Settings > General > About > Applications to see a list of 32-bit apps that don’t have direct updates available (if Applications isn’t tappable, either you still need to upgrade your device to iOS 10.3 or your device doesn’t contain any 32-bit apps). Tap an app in the list to load it in the App Store, where you may be able to find more info or a support link for the developer. Unfortunately, many old apps aren’t in the App Store anymore.

Now that you know which of your apps won’t survive the transition to iOS 11, what should you do? You have a few options:

• Delete the app. If you haven’t used an app in years, or don’t remember what it does, there’s no reason to keep it around. To get rid of it, back on the Home screen, press and hold on any app icon until all the icons start to wiggle, and then tap the X badge on the icon you want to delete. Press the Home button to stop the wiggling.
• Look for an update that’s a new app. Because Apple doesn’t let developers charge for updates, many developers have been forced to make their updates into new apps so they can afford future development. To see if this has happened, search in the App Store for the app and see if a new version appears. Or look for information on the company’s Web site.
• Look for an alternative app. Few iOS apps are truly unique, so you may be able to find an alternative that does basically the same thing.
• Don’t upgrade to iOS 11. Or, at least, don’t upgrade right away. In general, you should stay up to date with new versions of iOS to ensure that you’re protected from security vulnerabilities that Apple has discovered and patched. But there’s no harm in delaying an upgrade for a little while as you wait for an app to be updated or look for an alternative.
• Stick with an older device. If you have an extra iOS device that can’t run iOS 11 anyway, keep the app on that device. This approach may not work for an app you need on your primary iPhone, for instance, but it would for an old game that you could play on an elderly iPad 2.

Take a few minutes now so you won’t be surprised if one or more of your favorite apps can’t make the transition to iOS 11 when it ships in a few months!