There are many reasons you might want to get rid of apps from your iPhone or iPad. To begin, touch and hold on a blank spot on a Home Screen to enter “jiggle mode.” Then tap the ⊝ icon for any app to see the question about whether to delete the app entirely or merely … Read more
Did you know that you can bypass using your Mac’s Trash and simply delete a file immediately? Somehow I failed to learn that Apple added this feature in 2015 with OS X El Capitan (aka OS X 10.11). Deleting a file is usually a two step process. First, move the file to the Trash, then … Read more
If you backup your iPhone or iPad to iCloud, this Tech Tip is for you. Backing up your iPhone or iPad is an important thing to do since it provides an easy way for you to transfer your information to a new iPhone if your current iPhone is lost, stolen, or dies. Thus, it’s important … Read more
Is your Mac’s internal storage nearly full? If so, you may have seen an error message indicating that your startup disk is nearly full. I typically use OmniDiskSweeper to free up storage space on a Mac. One of the easiest techniques I use to free up some storage space is to remove backups of iPhones … Read more
Do you want to delete a backup of your iPhone or iPad from iCloud? There are two reasons you might want to do this. Sometimes, if one is unable to successfully backup an iPhone or iPad to iCloud, it’s because the current backup is somehow gumming up the system. By removing the existing backup then … Read more
Do you use Apple’s Mail application on your iPhone or iPad? Do you want to remove one of your email accounts? This process isn’t difficult, but there are a couple of non-obvious steps. Here are instructions for removing an email account from Mail on your iPhone or iPad.
Read moreDoes Time Machine continually display a status message of Preparing Backup and, thus, it fails to ever complete its current backup of your Mac? If so, you might need to delete the InProgress backup file. These InProgress backup files are created as part of Time Machine performing a backup. However, if the backup fails or gets … Read more
Do you have dozens or hundreds of messages that you want to delete from your iPhone? Here are two ways to delete multiple messages. [Be aware, that if you’re using an IMAP or Exchange email account that when you delete a message from your Inbox on your iPhone that it’ll be deleted from your Mac’s … Read more
Have you ever noticed that the “Other” storage section on your iPhone or iPad is quite large? Have you ever wondered what comprises this “Other” category? When you connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac, you’ll see a bar like the one pictured. This bar depicts the primary storage categories and shows their relative … Read more
Have you ever wanted to delete or forward an individual text message from your iPhone or iPad? Here are some simple instructions:
Read moreYour Mac may be storing extra iPhone and iPad backups. If so, they are wasting hard drive storage space. Here are instructions on how you can easily view a list of all iPad and iPhone backups and remove the extras.
Read moreWhen you put a file into Trash and then empty the Trash, you aren’t really deleting or destroying that file. If you really want to destroy that file, you should use Secure Empty Trash, which will overwrite the file. To do this, put a file into Trash, then click on the Finder menu and select Secure … Read more
Deleting or removing an application from a Mac can be both deceptively simple and surprisingly complex. Many applications can be deleted by simply dragging them to the Trash. However, this method will often leave small, related files tucked into various folders on the Mac. Thus, it is useful to know about some other ways to … Read more
Is your external backup hard drive full of Time Machine backup data? In last week’s Tech Tip, we talked about how Time Machine automatically deletes your oldest backups to make room for new backups. Time Machine typically does this, but I’ve seen it misbehave also. Alternatively, you might want to manually delete some of your old … Read more
When was the last time you looked at your Downloads folder? More importantly, when was the last time you cleaned it out? Unless you have reconfigured settings in both Mail and Safari, as well as some other applications, any file that you download gets put into the Downloads folder. I recommend that all users regularly … Read more
Would you like to quickly delete files from your Mac using a few keystrokes on your keyboard? Here’s how to do it.
Read moreDo you have a MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro? Have you noticed that its keyboard doesn’t have a “Forward Delete” (aka delete to the right) key like the one that exists on an iMac’s keyboard? This tip tells you how to perform a forward delete. Simply hold down the Function key, which is labeled … Read more
A few months ago a representative of Stellar Data Recovery contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing their product Stellar Phoenix Macintosh, a data recovery application. I was happy to oblige. At long last, here’s my assessment.
Read moreDid you know that Apple’s Preview lets you easily annotate and merge PDFs as well as delete and re-order pages within a PDF? Preview is a free application which comes bundled with Mac OS X. Apple has been quietly updating over the years and it has become quite capable and user-friendly. Just a few years … Read more
Do you want to give your computer to another person, but before giving it away you want to remove all of your data? If so, here’s an easy way to accomplish this. We’ll create a user account for the person who’ll be using the Mac, then delete your user account.
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