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 Time Machine backups to free up space on the external hard drive for some other use. In any case, here are instructions on how to manually delete some Time Machine backups.

On your Mac’s Desktop, double-click the icon of the external hard drive that stores your Time Machine backup data.

You’ll see a folder with the curious name of Backups.backupdb. Open this folder.

Inside you’ll see  a separate folder for each Macintosh computer that is backed up to this drive. If you only backup one Mac, then you’ll only see one folder. The folder is typically named something like Susan’s iMac. Open the folder containing the backups you want to delete.

Wait for the contents to be displayed. It could take a minute. Eventually, you’ll see a list of folders whose names are comprised of date and time stamps. Each of these folders contains backup data created by Time Machine.

Select one of more of these folders, typically the oldest ones, and drag them to the Trash icon on your Dock.

Empty the Trash by going to the Finder menu and selecting Empty Trash.

Sit back and wait while the Trash is emptied. You’ll be surprised how long this process takes. An even bigger surprise is that the status messages will indicate that the number of items to be deleted is a negative number. Of course this is illogical, but it will be displayed. Don’t worry about it. The deletion will eventually finish.

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 review the contents of their Downloads folder. Move files that you want to keep into another folder and delete files you no longer need.

As a Mac consultant, I regularly find Download folders with hundreds and sometimes thousands of files in them. When an email attachment arrives in Mail it is connected to a specific email message. Each time you double-click that file to open it, a new copy is added to your Downloads folder. Thus, I often see 3, 4, 5 or more copies of the same file in a person’s Downloads folder. Many people also get confused when trying to install applications such as Adobe Flash. They manage to download the installer, but they don’t know that they need to go to the Downloads folder, open the installer and follow its prompts to actually install the application. Then, a few days later they are again notified that Flash still needs to be updated and they dutifully download yet another copy of the installer. Consequently, it’s easy to understand how and why the Downloads folder accumulates large numbers of files. (Note: Once an application or application update has been installed then the installer located in the Downloads folder can be deleted.)

I try to keep my Downloads folder or close to empty. I just checked and there are 29 items in it currently, most of those from the past few weeks. So the next time you are procrastinating on an important work project, go clean out your Downloads folder. At least you can feel good about doing that task!

How to find your Downloads folder

Would you like to quickly delete files from your Mac using a few keystrokes on your keyboard? Here’s how to do it.

1. Click on the icon of the file or folder to select it.

2. Simultaneously press the Command key and the Delete key.

That’s it. The file is moved to the Trash Can.

I use this keyboard shortcut daily to throw away files on my Mac. Clients that see me using this keyboard shortcut ask me what I just did, and I’m happy to share. Give it a try. I’m sure you’ll find it increases your productivity by saving you a bit of time.

Do you have a MacBook 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 “fn” while pressing the delete key. The fn key is located in the lower left corner of the keyboard.

In case the phrase “forward delete” is confusing, let me elaborate. We all know that the delete key (aka the backspace key) deletes the character to the left of the insertion point. The forward delete button does the opposite. It deletes the character to the right of the insertion point.

Forward delete is not a new feature for Macintosh laptops. All Macs laptops have supported this feature for many years, but this feature isn’t obvious or well-documented, so many users don’t know about this feature.

If you would like to learn about more keyboard shortcuts you might find this Apple web page helpful.

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.

If you’ve read many of my tech tip articles, you know that I’m a staunch advocate for setting up robust, redundant and automated data backup systems. If one has such systems in place then one’s likelihood of actually needing a tool like Stellar Phoenix Macintosh should be slim. However, the need for such tools can still arise for a myriad of reasons. Maybe one hasn’t yet copied photos from their camera’s SD storage card to their computer. Maybe one uses a USB flash drive to move files around and doesn’t backup this drive. Maybe one’s backup is misconfigured and it isn’t actually backing up an important folder. Any such drive could fail or a user could accidentally delete a file. Anybody could end up needing a data recovery tool such as Stellar Phoenix Macintosh.

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh has a simple user interface which includes buttons to recover data from various types of drives, including iPods. It also has a button dedicated to photo recovery. Within the main Drive Recovery section it provides options to try to recover deleted files, files from re-formatted drives and from drives which don’t mount. I happened to have two non-mounting drives sitting around. One was an external firewire hard drive and the other was a USB flash drive. Both were personal drives I’d used for years, but had stopped working properly in the past six months. Nothing critical was on either drive, so I had only made half-hearted attempts to figure out what was wrong with them previously. I’d been unable to get either drive to mount. Not surprisingly, Stellar Phoenix Macintosh wasn’t able to see them or recover any data from them. I didn’t really expect that it would since I suspect that there were physical problems with the drives. If I had really needed to get data from these drives I would have sent them to a professional data recovery company, like Drive Savers, which has a strong track record of being able to recover data.

Next, I took a fully-functioning external firewire drive that contained a backup copy of some of my music and movies. I put all of my files into the Trash and emptied it. Then I asked Stellar Phoenix Macintosh to try to restore the files. I used it’s Deleted File Recovery feature. I showed it the external drive and let it scan the entire 60 GB drive. Understandably, this was a time consuming process since it needed to scan every block. I don’t know how long it took since I went to bed, but I’m sure it took more than an hour. By morning it had finished, but I didn’t have time to finish restoring my files, so it conveniently let me save the scan file, presumably some sort of directory of the drive. Subsequently, I used Stellar Phoenix Macintosh’s Resume Recovery feature. This let me pick up where I left off.

Stellar Phoenix correctly listed the folders I had deleted. I started to navigate through this folder list and it correctly listed the names of sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. What annoyed me was that Stellar Phoenix’s window could not be resized. Additionally, the 3 sections within it’s window could not be resized either. This made it cumbersome to navigate through the folder hierarchy. This is a significant shortcoming of the application’s user interface. Up to this point, I had liked the interface. The buttons had been simple, well-labeled and explanations of their functions were frequently listed on screen, so it was quite jarring and annoying to suddenly realize that I couldn’t resize the window at all. However, I continued with the data restore. I selected about 10 mp3 files as well as a number of PDF documents and Microsoft Word files. I clicked the Recover button, waited a few seconds and the files were saved to a new folder on my Mac’s Desktop. I was then very disappointed when I tried to open these files and not a single one could be opened properly. I’m not sure why. Stellar Phoenix had done an admirable job of seeing the deleted files, as well as their file names and folder structure. All of this is important, but it failed in the final and most important step of successfully recovering the files.

I wanted to give Stellar Phoenix another chance so I took a healthy 1 GB USB flash drive, formatted it, copied a few files onto it and then deleted them a few minutes later. I then had Stellar Phoenix scan the drive, which took about 10 minutes. It was not able to recover the folder structure or the file names, but it did create folders for each type of file it found. In other words, it created folders for PDFs, JPEGs, Word and RTF files, for example. I then asked Stellar Phoenix to recover the files. It did so and all of the files opened properly. I was pleased with the results of this simple test. I should mention, however, that in a real world situation of recovering a few files from a hard drive that has been used for years, the inability of data recovery software to recover filenames and folder structures can mean that one could have to spend a fair amount of time locating the few desired files from a larger pile of recovered files.

In conclusion, Stellar Phoenix could be useful as a data recovery tool, certainly for recently deleted files and possibly in other situations. However, the lesson that I take away from these experiments is that data recovery is not always possible. Even when it is possible, it can be time consuming to conduct drive scans and locate the particular files you need. If you need to employ a professional data recovery service, it can be very expensive. Thus, I think it’s more prudent to setup, monitor and test robust, redundant and automated backup systems so you can hopefully avoid having to rely on data recovery products at all.

Did 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 ago one would have needed to buy the relatively expensive Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional PDF Editor to do many of these tasks.

Note: There are slight differences in how certain tasks are done if you’re using OS X 10.5′s version of Preview. All of these demonstrations are done using OS X 10.6′s version of Preview.

It’s also important to know that the following techniques may not work on all PDFs. It’s possible for a person who creates a PDF to lock the file which prevent others from manipulating it. Typically, locking a PDF like this requires use of an application like Adobe’s Acrobat.

I’ve created short video tutorials on how to do the following tasks. Read the brief text description and then click the link to watch the video.

If you need more extensive editing capabilities then what is offered by Preview you should check out the relatively affordable PDFPen.

1. Reorder pages in a PDF – Open a PDF file then click the Sidebar button to view the thumbnail icons for each page. Click on one of the thumbnails and drag the page up or down. Look for the horizontal blue line that appears indicating the new location of the page. To remove a page you can simply click on the thumbnail icon for a page to select it and the press the Delete key on your keyboard.

2. Extract pages from a PDF – Open a PDF file then click the Sidebar button to view the thumbnail icons for each page. Click on the first page you want to extract. If you want to extract additional pages then hold down the Command key and click on additional thumbnail icons. Release the Command key and drag the thumbnail icons to the Desktop. A new PDF file will be created on the Desktop. Rename the file as desired. Open this new file by double-clicking to verify that it contains the pages that you want. You can re-order the pages by following the tip listed above.

3. Move pages between PDFs (Merge PDFs) – Open a PDF file then click the Sidebar button to view the thumbnail icons for each page. Open a second PDF and click its Sidebar button too. Position the two PDFs so you can view both file’s Sidebars at the same time. Select one or more pages from one file’s Sidebar and drag them into the other file’s Sidebar. Look for the horizontal blue line that appears in the receiving file’s Sidebar. This blue line indicates where the new page appear. You can re-order the pages by following the tip listed above. Go to the File menu and select Save to save the changes.

4. Annotate text in a PDF -  Open a PDF file, click the Annotate button to review a row of tools at the bottom of the window. Use these tools to highlight text in a variety of colors, draw a line through the text, enclose text inside a rectangle or oval, or add a note in the margin of the PDF.

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.

These instructions were written for OS X 10.5 and 10.6, but should work on previous versions as well, though some of the names and wordings have changed subtly.

• Turn on the Mac and let it start up.
• Go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences and click on Accounts.
• If the padlock in the lower left corner is locked, click on it to unlock it. Enter your user account’s password when prompted to do so.
• Click the plus sign button to add a new user account. Set “New Account” to “Administrator”. Enter the real world name of the new user of the Mac in the “Full Name” field. Enter a name in the “Account name” field; this name can not contain spaces, capital letters or punctuation marks. Enter a password in both the “Password” and “Verify” fields. Enter a password hint if you’d like.
• Click the “Create Account” button.
• Go to the Apple menu and select Log Out which appears at the bottom of the menu.

• You’ll be presented with a login window. Type in the account name and password for the account you just created. You’ll be logged into this new user’s account. Now that you’re no longer using your account, it can be deleted.
• Go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences then click on Accounts.
• If the padlock in the lower left corner is locked, click on it to unlock it. Enter this new user account’s password when prompted to do so.
• Click on your old user account which will be listed on the left-hand side of the window.
• Click the minus sign button to delete your old user account.
• Select “Delete the home folder” to have all of the data in your user account deleted.
• Click the OK button. The actual deletion process could take 10-15 minutes, especially if there is a lot of data in your account.
• When the deletion process is complete, you can close the System Preferences window.

Here are instructions on how to remove and re-add a print queue. I commonly do this to fix printer issues. Somehow the old queue gets “damaged” and stops working properly. As long as you don’t mind losing any of the print jobs which may be sitting in the queue, go ahead and do the following:

1. Go to Apple menu, select System Preferences, click on Print & Fax.
2. On the left-hand list of print queues, click once on the print queue you’d like to delete. For this example, let’s assume the queue is named Brother HL-5250. Click the minus sign icon below this list to permanently delete this print queue.
3. Click the plus sign icon (next to the minus sign) to begin adding a new print queue.
4. A window will appear listing all printers directly connected to your Mac or available via your network. You should see the Brother HL-5250 printer listed. In order to appear, the printer would need to be turned on and directly connected to your Mac using a USB cable or connected to your network using an ethernet cable. (If you don’t see the printer then you’ll first have to figure out why it’s not showing up.)
5. Click once on the Brother HL-5250 printer to select it. Wait a few seconds while a conversation occurs between your Mac and the Brother printer. Once the conversation is complete, then the printer driver will be selected and listed at the bottom of this window. Once the “Add” button becomes active, click it.
6. You’ll be taken back to the printer list in Print & Fax. You should see the Brother HL-5250 on this list now. Close this window by clicking the red dot.
7. Send a print job to the Brother printer to test it.

Here are step-by-step instructions for deleting bookmarks from Safari and Firefox. The instructions might vary slightly if you’re using a different version of Safari or Firefox.

If you use Safari 4 or newer

A. Open Safari
B. Go to the Bookmarks menu and select Show All Bookmarks
C. Your current window will change to show your bookmarks. On the left-hand list click on the “Collection” that you want to change. For example, you might click on Bookmark Menu since this is where most people keep bookmarks. Then, on the right-hand side, click on the bookmark that you want to delete.
D. Press the Delete key on your keyboard.

If you use Firefox 

A. Open Firefox
B. Go to the Bookmarks menu and select Organize Bookmarks. (In newer versions of Firefox select Show All Bookmarks.)
C. A new window will open. On the left-hand list click on Bookmark Menu. Then, on the right-hand side, click on the bookmark that you want to delete.
D. Press the Delete key on your keyboard.