It’s a common problem with ageing Macbooks. In fact, every single Macbook I’ve ever owned has had this problem, some more than once.
It starts out with what seems like a bit of a bulge under the front of your Macbook. Soon the trackpad starts to have problems. Sometimes it seems like you can only press it when you apply pressure at the correct angles. Soon that bulge gets bigger and you can’t press the trackpad at all.
Arq Backup provides a simple backup solution for your Mac that can run in the background, constantly keeping your important files backed up to your choice of cloud storage platform. It encrypts your files locally and regularly backs up your changes when you are connected to the internet. Since it is merely a tool that connects to your choice of storage provider it gives you a lot of flexibility to handle your backups as you see fit to provide the greatest level of control and redundancy. The quickest and simplest solution that provides a low-cost cloud backup option though is Amazon Drive, so I’ve chosen to use it for this tutorial, but you can connect to other cloud storage providers in very similar ways.
Let’s get started.
17/12/2017 UPDATE: This comparison was based on ExpanDrive 5. ExpanDrive 6 has been released with some big changes. Check out my review! I’ll be updating this article soon to represent a comparison between Odrive and ExpanDrive 6
That is the question I am presently trying to work out, but to what end?
Well, Odrive and ExpanDrive both provide unified access to your cloud providers as though they were local drives on your computer. What this means is that you can do away with file synchronisation and the need to store local copies of files.
As an example, a typical Dropbox setup would have your Dropbox folder on your computer where you store everything. If your local hard drive gets full then you need to look at what you can remove by selectively synchronising the files you need and not the ones you don’t. The downside of this is that when you do need some of those files you chose to stop synchronising you have to either re-sync them or download them from the web interface, neither of which is ideal. Odrive and ExpanDrive take this and say ok, how about we just synchronise the files we need as we need them and until we need them they live in the cloud, thus freeing up lots of local disk space. In addition to that, they enable access in the same way to multiple cloud storage providers such as Amazon Drive, Google Drive, Amazon S3, OneDrive, Box and more.
Which one is better, though? I don’t want to fork out cash for something I don’t use in the long run, and ultimately I’d like to use it across a few computers without paying extra.
A good question.
I recently needed to move my iCloud connected Apple Photos library to an external hard drive as it was taking up too much space on my laptop. Since I was doing that anyway I decided to also put it in my Dropbox so that I could get an extra backup of it as well.
If you just move the library and then delete it, Apple Photos tends to not like you too much. Apple has made it possible to move the location fairly easily though, you just need to do the steps in the right order. Here is the process I used.
I recently picked up one of the Optus Huawei E5573 4G+ Wifi Modem’s. It’s a pretty straight forward assembly and only takes a few minutes to get you connected to the internet. Check out the video below to see the assembly process: One thing to keep in mind, your wifi SSID and password are both … Read more
I’ve moved my Dropbox onto an external hard drive because it’s just too big to store all the files I use regularly on my local hard drive. However, I like to keep a local backup in addition to the Dropbox backup, so I wanted to add it to my Time Machine which has more than enough room for the extra drive. Here’s how I did it in 50 seconds.
In Australia, one of the formats commonly used for television broadcast files is OP1a compliant MXF. Channel 7 has very specific requirements for how the file should be formatted for their primary and all their secondary channels. MXF is essentially a container, and inside it is the video content, the audio content, and it can also include the subtitle content. If you’ve never worked with broadcast media before it is a bit of an obscure format that you will probably not have heard of. Fortunately Adobe Premiere makes it extremely easy to export into this format. Below you will find the settings I use that are accepted by Channel 7. I cannot promise that your media will be accepted using the same settings, but I can’t see any reason it wouldn’t be.
When I switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone I quickly noticed a difference between silent mode on the Blackberry and ‘silent’ on the iPhone. In fact, when my iPhone was on silent mode, it still dinged every few minutes when new emails came in. Suffice to say my first few nights involved a lot of waking up.
I spent ages hunting online for how to check my usage/remaining balanced with Our Telekom (Breeze) in the Solomon Islands, I couldn’t find anything anywhere though to tell me, and there wasn’t anything in the sim card pack I received either.
So for anyone else looking, I ended up calling their customer service number who told me how to check it.
In most of the countries I have been to, my iPhone has automatically detected the carrier settings and configured itself for me. The Solomon Islands is to date the one exception. It worked fine for voice calls and text messages, but when it came to data usage, no go.