Several months ago, I had a catastrophic drive failure with my main music computer which wiped out my audio drive & motherboard!  I decided then and there that I would never let myself be vulnerable for data loss again.

I recently purchased the new Mercury Elite-Al Pro mini, and I love it! The purchase was made specifically for storing my precious music, financial records, and picture data off-site. That way, if anything were to physically happen to my computer, I would not lose any of my data.

Initially, I was going to ask my brother-in-law to hold onto the backup drive at his house for my off-site storage, but he’s approximately 40 miles from where I live.  But then I remembered my safe deposit box at the bank. Why not put the drive in there along with my paper based documents?

The beauty of this drive, as well as the Mercury On-The-Go-Pro, is that it fits easily in my safe deposit box.  So with very little expense, I now have off-site storage within 2 miles from where my studio is for protecting all my precious data.

I will be purchasing a second Mercury Elite-Al Pro mini so I can reduce the trips to my bank to every two weeks with new data saved. I’ve found that this is an excellent product, and now I finally have an inexpensive off-site storage solution!

In case you didn’t know this, all OWC and Newer Technology storage solutions come bundled with a copy of Prosoft Engineering’s Data Backup 3 software.

Data Backup 3 is a powerful utility that allows you to backup, restore and synchronize your data with minimal effort. Whether you are a new computer user or a seasoned professional, Data Backup 3 offers you just the right amount of power, flexibility and ease-of-use to help you protect your files fast.

Prosoft has released an update to the program, which—among other things—improves Snow Leopard compatibility.

As with many utilities, updating to the latest revision is recommended for maximum compatibility and performance on your system.

You can find more information and download the latest version from Prosoft’s Web site.

Recently, while doing a little “housekeeping” on my work Mac, I noticed that I had less than 10% of my drive available. While I do have a lot of large project files I work on from day to day, I was sure that my files shouldn’t have taken up anywhere near that much space.

So, in an effort to find out where the excess fat on my drive was, I turned to Grand Perspective, a free little utility that maps out your hard drive and gives you an overview of what is where and how much space it’s taking up.

Fortunately, I caught my problem early on into the process. In my case, the culprit was unusual but not unheard of.

On the root level of your drive, there is a hidden folder called Volumes (you can get there by hitting Command-Shift-G in the finder, then typing in “/Volumes” in the window or sheet that pops up). In this folder are aliases that point to the actual volumes mounted on your Mac.

Sometimes, when a drive is unmounted in an unusual manner (such as unplugging it without ejecting, then reattaching immediately), the alias to the drive is duplicated, showing up with a number after it. While you don’t see this on the desktop, it is still there. When you properly unmount the drive, the last alias created disappears, but that “original” alias remains. In and of itself, this isn’t much of a problem, a minor annoyance at best.

The problem is that the drive that was experiencing this “dual identity” was the drive I clone to. In my Volumes folder, I had four aliases of this drive. Unfortunately, when a drive isn’t available, a program will sometimes create a file or folder out of this alias and start to write to it as if it were its own volume.

That’s what happened to me. At least one—probably two—of the aliases had my backup written to it. As the Volumes folder is usually skipped by a clone, there weren’t any recursive backups, but it was enough to fill up my hard drive.

Fortunately, the solution was incredibly simple. All I had to do was unmount my clone drive, drag all the remaining aliases of that drive out of the Volumes folder and into the trash, and then empty the trash.

That got rid of over 1.4 million “extra” files – over 60% of my drive. That’s a lot of garbage.

The moral of this story is to keep an eye out on how much room is available on your drive. If it starts filling up faster than it should, you may want to check things out and make sure you don’t have a “hidden drive” on your computer.

Since about OS X 10.4 or so, Apple has included an application—Front Row—that allows you to play movies and music stored in your iTunes library, in your Movies folder and DVDs with a simple, easy-to-read interface similar to the one on the AppleTV. This is great if you have, say, a Mac mini attached to your home entertainment center or are using an iMac in place of a television in a dorm room. (I’m sure there are other combinations as well, but I’m not going to waste half an article rattling them off…)

However, there is a somewhat annoying aspect to Front Row. Command-Esc, the command used to launch Front Row from the keyboard, is very close to Command-`(just to the left of the 1, underneath Esc), which allows you to switch between the windows in a single app.

As I use the latter command often (I usually have 2 or three browser windows open at once), and I am (for lack of a better term) a klutz, I often hit Command-Escape by accident, which of course sets off Front Row, which is usually then followed by a rather colorful stream of expletives.

Finally, I had enough. It was time to stop Front Row’s unintended launching once and for all. Fortunately, it’s incredibly easy to do.

Article Continues…

Well, with the holidays finally here and gone, many of us are left with fond memories of the past year and, depending on how avid a photo-taker or videographer you are, you’ve accumulated a ton of pictures and video of family, friends, vacations, pets, parties and the like. Now is a perfect time to check your data backup plan and to make sure that if your hard drive fails, you don’t lose all those memories.

While having a working hard drive backup is great, there is an even better way when it comes to digital media.  Make yourself a hard copy of your photo and video libraries from time to time. I’m talking about burning those files to Blu-Ray, DVD, or CD depending on the size of your collection, the physical size of your photos and videos, and how long it’s been since your last hard-copy backup.

With all your memories backed up this way, you’ll be sure to have them in the future. Not every backup plan is foolproof – so the more ways you back up, the better. A few years ago my backup plan included cloning the hard drive in my laptop and keeping a copy on an external drive. That way I’d have a perfect copy of everything on my computer. I was performing the cloning function and writing over the backup drive when the hard drive in my laptop physically failed. I lost everything on both drives – the main drive failing corrupted the data on the drive I was backing up to.

My only saving grace was that I had just about everything that was most important to me burned to CDs. It took a while to install a new drive, reinstall the operating system and move everything back over from CD – mainly because there were so many of them. Had I had copies on DVD, or better yet, Blu-Ray it would have gone much quicker.

Last month, OWC introduced the 12x “Quad Interface” Mercury Pro Blu-ray External Drives, which is ideal for backing up large amounts of video, photos, music, or any other data files Blu-ray is capable of burning up to 50GB of data onto a single Blu-ray disc in 15 to 20 minutes. That’s equal to 50,000 JPEG images, 17,500 MP3 songs, 25 DVD quality movies, or just under four hours of High Definition video! The Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives also read and/or write virtually all types of optical media, including DVD R/RW & Dual-Layer, DVD-RAM, and CD-R/RW.

Its the perfect device for making that New Year’s Resolution to make sure your data is kept safe and secure.

With the cold weather upon us, it makes sense to touch on a topic that few consider…bringing a hard drive up to room temperature – or at least operating temperature parameters – before using.

Any fluid can freeze if it gets cold enough, including the lubricant inside your hard drive. When the hard drive tries to spin up the platters will not turn because the fluid isn’t viscous enough to allow the platters to spin at their proper speed. As a result, you’re looking at a drive that won’t boot up at all, or worse, is spinning at the wrong speeds and possibly corrupting the data on the drive.

An equally important factor is condensation. Ever pull an ice cold beer out of the cooler on a warm day? What happens? That’s right! Condensation forms on the outside of the bottle. Now think about that hard drive you just pulled in from the cold… exactly. Water and electronic components just don’t mix. If you’re receiving a brand new hard drive that has been sitting out in the freezing cold, its best to let it come up to temperature in the original shipping container so that the increase in temperature is gradual.

So, exciting as receiving your new drive is, we wouldn’t suggest immediately opening and plugging it into a NewerTech Voyager or USB Universal Drive Adapter while in a “frozen” state. The same factors also apply when bringing in your laptop from the cold to protect the hard drive inside.

Now, keep in mind, we’re talking very cold weather here. Most modern hard drives have a low operating temperature of 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), aka. the freezing point of water. And the vast majority are safe for storage in even colder temperatures. We’re also talking about platter-based hard disks. A Solid State Drive (SSD) with no moving parts has a much greater operating temperature range, as low as -55 degrees Celsius (-67 degrees Fahrenheit). So, if you’re planning an Arctic Expedition anytime soon – SSD would definitely be the way to go.

We talk a lot about backing up around here; I’d say it has been the third-most popular topic here on the OWC Blog, behind memory upgrades and price specials. In fact, OWC Mike H. posted a piece about backing up early last week.

However, this time around, I’d like to take a slightly different track that we don’t always cover – even with automated services like Time Machine, backing up still needs to be an active process.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll relate that this particular topic stems from recent personal experience. Earlier this month, my father (who I help with the upkeep on his Mac mini at his company) had his main hard drive fail on him.

“No problem,” I thought, “I set up an automated nightly backup on the system. All I need to do is replace the internal drive, then restore from the backup and we’ll be good to go.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple. Sure, we made annual backups to CDs, mostly for record-keeping purposes, but trusted that backup software to do the rest in between. The problem is that for some reason, the backup routine had stopped sometime over April of last year. As it had run reliably for quite some time prior to that point, we’d never checked it for consistency – that was our major mistake.

As a result, none of the data created since the beginning of the year was backed up when the hard drive went bad. Considering the amount of money involved with the data (I won’t go into details, but it is rather significant), the concept of losing it all is pretty much catastrophic.

There are a pair of lessons we can learn from this story:

1.) Automatic backups need to be periodically checked.

Check your backups from time to time just to make sure all the data is in good shape. In my case, it would have also helped to determine whether or not the darn thing was backing up in the first place. Believe me, the worst time to find out your backup is out of date or no good is on the day you need it.

2.) Make multiple copies of data you can’t afford to lose.

I also recommend keeping one or more these copies off-site, so if one backup fails (or is damaged, etc.) you at least have copies of the really important data somewhere.

Fortunately, OWC has all the equipment you need to set up or improve your backup strategy. From our award-winning external Storage Solutions, to recordable media, to replacement internal drives for ones that have failed, we have you covered.

Oh, as for our little story above, we were fortunate enough to be able to recover the “lost” data by using Prosoft Engineering’s Data Rescue 3. We hooked the failed drive up to another computer via an OWC Express enclosure, and let Data Rescue go at it. It took about a week to process, but from all the checks we’ve done, it appears that all the data that had once been “lost” has now been recovered.

I love a happy ending.

You’ve probably noticed that while many OWC blog posters and followers have a picture or some other avatar associated with their name, others just have a blank silhouette head next to their names. Have you been wondering how to personalize your public image?

It’s quite simple actually. Thanks to Gravatar: A Globally Recognized Avatar

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, including the OWC Blog.

Your chosen picture to upload is associated with your email address (or addresses) that you chose to sign up with each site with. Gravatar even allows several pictures to be uploaded at once, so you can either change your avatar at a moments notice (like in iChat) or assign a separate image to each of your email addresses. This service is free and to use it, just follow the link above (or click on their logo in this post) for the complete details and even a short video on how to get your Gravatar today.

Photos and Music

Computers do more than just connect people to the Internet cloud of web pages, e-mail, faces of book, and the birds of Twitter. Digital devices like iPods and digital cameras changed how we all listen to music, watch video, take photos, and more importantly…where we store life’s media. Backing that data up is no longer an option…it’s time to get serious about data backup now!

If you’re reading this blog, you likely already are backing up. And if a friend or family member sent you this page, thank them for caring enough to help you not be a victim of the computing fun that is known as drive failure and absolute data loss.

You may be surprised how many people you know that don’t backup their home computer. Even computer savvy friends may not have a backup. The false confidence many bestow on their hard drives living forever can be surprising.

It’s so easy to bring this up in conversation too. If you see a friend using a digital camera, iPod, or know a family member who stores all the digital photos sent from friends and family, ask them what their backup strategy is. It might be a good thing to get them thinking about what would happen if their computer’s hard drive went kablooey.

The key is it doesn’t have to be hard or scary!
I like solutions that do the work for you, and you don’t have to think about. The bare minimum needed is a single external drive that can connect via USB 2.0 that you can use to backup all your files. You can usually upgrade to faster connections and more drive space for just a few bucks more than the base external drive. Much of OWC’s line of externals offers tiered upgrades so you can get what’s right for your needs and with Plug and Play ease of use. Why go external? Portability and easy installation are a couple good reasons. If you want to go with internal drives, OWC has got you covered there too.

Software Built-in or Provided, it’s all good!
For Macs, Time Machine is da bomb in my world, and I just have to give huge props to Apple for realizing the need for backup of our life’s digital media. There’s also other backup software out there that makes backing up relatively easy, or more controlled if you don’t like the complete computer backup that Apple’s Time Machine performs.

And that’s why OWC’s external solutions are perfect for Mac and PC backup: rock solid, award-winning, benchmark proven hardware and drives complimented by a $200 retail value disk utility bundle with leading backup programs…making OWC a “one stop shop” for digital media backup!

Start Spreading The Good Word!
Become a backup evangelist among your community of friends and family. Strike up a conversation, and use your knowledge for good to help save them from the heartache and loss that can and likely will happen if they don’t get serious about data backup now!

Many people who ordered one of the new 27″ iMacs (including many with the fancy-schmancy i5 or i7 processors) are turning on their brand new machines, only to find… that they don’t turn on!

Apparently, a number of the i7 iMacs (including one purchased by Engadget) are just flat out not booting. Apple’s support forums have quite a few complaints about 27″ iMacs either arriving DOA, having intermittent video problems, or having odd software glitches. This is, of course, in addition to the large number of people receiving their new 27″ iMacs with the lower left corner of the glass broken.

When we benchmarked the new iMacs, we didn’t have any of these problems, but judging by the number of reports on these, it’s a good chance that we were just lucky.

This brings to mind an old rule of thumb about hardware from Apple – you may want to wait until the second or third revision to make sure all the kinks are worked out. While it’s fun to have the latest and greatest, sometimes it’s easier (not to mention less expensive) to just upgrade the memory and hard drive in your current machine, rather than buy a whole new one.

If you upgrade a Mac to an SSD drive – having good management of your files is important where you use an additional drive or drives to have capacity for your photo, music, video libraries, etc.  With the relatively small sizes of SSD drives, they can fill up with data fast; but the performance benefits of SSD are undeniable.

If you’ve been following our blog since the beginning, we’ve given several tips on relocating these types of files off your internal storage on onto external storage solutions. Today’s modern operating systems make this pretty easy.

For those audiophiles out there, an iTunes library can quickly become an overwhelming size.  Back in March, we showed you how to move your iTunes library to an external hard drive such as the Mercury On-the-Go Pro.

Photography enthusiasts will also find their pictures taking up more and more hard drive space.  You can also move your iPhoto library to an external drive to keep your primary drive lean and operating at top speeds.

My basic rule of thumb to follow is to keep the Operating System and your applications themselves on the main, internal hard drive while storing the files, documents, pictures, movies, music, etc. on the separate drive.  By doing so, you can even use a 64GB SSD for boot and application performance benefits WHILE maintaining access to extensive file libraries that can’t all fit onto an SSD.

Check out OWC’s full selection of SSD Drives and External Hard Drive Solutions to find the fit that’s right for you.

Four years ago today, Web users everywhere that were looking to escape from the mediocrity of Internet Explorer were treated to the official release of a new browser, Mozilla Firefox. Since then, It has since become one of the most popular Web browsers currently available, second only to Internet Explorer, which, of course, ships as the default browser for Windows.

Firefox started as an offshoot of the Mozilla Application Suite which, in turn, was built on the open-source code of Netscape Communicator. Since then, Mozilla dropped active development in favor of the standalone apps Firefox and Thunderbird, and the full application suite was spun off as the community-developed project, SeaMonkey.

Firefox is considered by most to be stable and safe, and is available in Mac, Windows and Linux versions. That compatibility, plus an extensive add-on architecture which allows users to customize Firefox, are the main contributing factors to its popularity.

Even though I, personally, tend to stick with Safari for the vast majority of my Web browsing (especially in Snow Leopard, where Safari 4 is a 64-bit application), I still keep an updated copy of Firefox handy; every so often, I’ll find a site that pitches a fit over Safari, yet handles Firefox just fine. However, on the two virtual machines (Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux) I have on my MacBook Pro, Firefox is the main browser I use.

Many other people I know, both Mac and Windows users, use Firefox almost exclusively. Its compatibility with many corporate and online banking sites is far better than Safari (without changing user agent strings); I don’t think we need to go into its security advantages over Internet Explorer. ;-) I’ve also found Firefox to be reasonably zippy on PowerPC-based machines, often rendering more complex pages faster than Safari, so it may be a good option for you if you have an older machine.

Overall, Firefox is well worth the download, even if you don’t use it every day. You can find the latest version (v.3.5.5, released late last week) at www.mozilla.org/firefox

During my time here at OWC, I have cultivated my love of the Mactintosh independent software community. In the past, I have shared some software gems with you, be it here on the OWC Blog, in various QuickTips and in full-blown reviews. What I’ve always liked about independent software companies is that they often put out software that’s just as good as (and sometimes, better than) the larger software companies at a fraction of the price, so I’m generally glad to toss a few bucks their way and/or give them a featured write-up.

It’s a part of that support for independent developers that I feel the need to draw attention to a great deal going on over at MacHeist. These guys somehow manage to get together high-quality pieces of software from independent developers and bundle them together for additional savings over the already affordable prices of most independent software. For a limited time, though, they’ve got an even better price on their bundle than they usually do – FREE!

Yep. that’s right. For the next six days or so, you can register and download the MacHeist nanoBundle at absolutely no cost.

So what’s in this free bundle? Let’s take a look. Article Continues…

Sometimes even the best educated guesses can be thrown for a loop when an unforeseen “X-Factor” comes into play. Such is the case with the Late 2009 iMacs.

As we were getting information together for the new iMac instructional videos, we came across a little tidbit that, apparently, hasn’t been covered anywhere else: Apple has switched the iMac’s method of hard drive temperature sensing. They’ve gone from an external sensor that attached to the outside surface of the drive to a connector that seems to use the drive’s internal sensors. Article Continues…

Every now and then, you may find that your startup seems slower than normal or that some things are just not working the way they used to. When that happens, it is usually best to be proactive, rather than putting it off until the problem potentially gets worse. There are numerous things that can cause problems with your Mac, both hardware and software. When working with computers, it pays to not only have a physical toolkit, but also some good software tools to help with various situations. Having the right options at your disposal can help save time, which most people do not seem to have enough of.

One great little maintenance utility you can use is Onyx. Onyx takes several important maintenance tasks and puts them all in to one easy to use package. Even better, though, this software is free! Article Continues…

About a year ago, OWC CEO Larry O’Connor revisited a recurring topic in his Tips n’ Deals Newsletter and OWC Chris covered that in a post on how the Rules of Upgrading rarely change.

Both of them explored five different ways you can upgrade your Mac to extend its useful life. Since some time has transpired, some new machines were released by Apple, and Snow Leopard has now become a reality, it’s time we take a fresh look at some “old” rules of upgrading:

#1 – Upgrade Your Memory
I think we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve talked about how upgrading your memory gives you the best performance boost for the investment. Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 is a 64-bit (along with its applications) which allows each application to address more than 4GB of RAM at a time. OSX’s memory management now is a lot more flexible in keeping its cached instructions, lessening the need for a hard drive hit.

The bottom line is simple: Your OS and Applications can certainly run on the minimum memory, but having more memory installed makes for a whole lot more enjoyable and productive experience, all for a low investment. With upgrades ranging from $44.97 for a 2GB module for a MacBook, through 16GB of RAM for an iMac, up to a full 32GB of memory priced at $27.25 per GB to max out your Mac Pro, a memory upgrade is dollar-for-dollar the best investment you can make for your Mac.

You can find memory (and other upgrades) for nearly every Mac produced over the past two decades with our easy online upgrade guide. In addition to the instructions you’ll find in just about any Apple computer manual, we’ve got easy-to-follow free installation videos that further illustrate how easy it is for you to get that memory into your Mac. And if you need further help, it is just a click a way in our online tech center.

#2 – Upgrade Your Storage.
The big news for 2009 was the rapid pace of developments in storage capacity, speed, and overall performance. Now we’re talking up to 2.0TB for 3.5″ drives, up to 1.0TB for 2.5″ drives, and SSDs have truly emerged as a legitimate consideration. Since we promised SSD benchmarks in our last coverage of this upgrade, we’re going to focus on them here. I did a comparison of how SSDs measured up to hard drives and SSDs were the speed, reliability, and quiet running champs. Just how much faster are SSDs? Check it out: Article Continues…

It’s a fact the files we work with on a day-to-day basis are getting larger. As digital cameras grow more advanced, so do the sizes of the pictures they take. Music is now available in near-pristine, lossless formats and movies are now are in high-definition video with multichannel soundtracks. Then, there are the various applications themselves, many of which can take up multiple gigabytes. All this data takes up space and before you know it, your hard drive is maxed out.

When you find yourself in this predicament , you have three options: clean out some accumulated files, get an external storage solution to move files to and provide more storage capacity, or use our free instructional videos to put a higher capacity drive into your machine.

Cleaning out older files isn’t really a viable option. Eventually, your drive will continue to fill and you’re back to square one.

Transferring older and/or duplicate files to an external drive is often the easiest route to take and we make that option simple with Plug and Play solutions for Macs and PCs. Unfortunately, if you’re highly mobile and using a MacBook or MacBook Pro, carrying around that extra drive and the connection cables (even with a bus-powered pocket-sized drive like the Mercury On-The-Go Pro) adds a few more things to pack and keep your eyes on.

Which brings us to upgrading your Mac’s internal drive. While the thought of “opening the hood” on your machine sounds daunting, it’s actually very straightforward with our instructional videos that walk you through the process.

After upgrading your internal drive, transferring your data over from your “old” drive to a new, faster, larger one is just as easy when using Migration Assistant in conjunction with a fresh install of OS X. To show you how to get it done, OWC Chris has created step-by-step instructions in our Tips & Reviews archives.

And when you’ve got everything up and running with all the data you had from the previous drive, we even make it easy to retask that “old” drive, by either putting it into an external enclosure or using it with one of our Voyager hard drive docks. If you choose the enclosure route, we may even have an installation video to show you how to do that too!

It doesn’t get any easier than OWC for the tips, tools, and products you need to get more from your technology investment.

Back in August ,when Apple updated their MacBook Pro line of laptops, the ExpressCard slot was replaced with an SD cardslot.  Here in October, Apple again has added this feature to the entire iMac lineup. It’s located just beneath the optical drive on each machine.

This would be a good time to revisit my prior article: What good is the MacBook Pro SD card slot anyway? to learn how to make the most out of this added feature.  It goes into detail on making a boot drive out of an SD card as well as an emergency startup disk.

Additionally, the widescreen form factor of the new iMac lends to using the machines for multimedia displays.  An SD card makes a great medium for transferring your multimedia data between computers.  A DVD quality movie takes up about 2GB per hour of playtime.  With SD cards ranging from 2GB to 32GB currently, one could store up to 16 hours of footage on a single card.  More exciting is the introduction of the SDXC format which as early as 2010 could have us storing from 64GB up to 2.0TB on a single card.

I for one wouldn’t be surprised to see movies, TV shows and other media being distributed on SD cards just the same as we see CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs currently. Time will tell on that one.