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.

Would you like to create a questionnaire, sign-up form, quiz or other type of form that people can fill out on their computer? If so, here are some general instructions on how to create a form using Microsoft Word 2011 on your Mac. Once you’ve created the form you can distribute it as an email attachment or via a web site. The recipient could then complete the form on his or her computer and return it to you. Microsoft has instructions about how to create interactive forms in Word 2008, Word 2004 and Word X. Here are some pointers to how to create a form using Word 2011.

By default Word 2011′s Form Control features are hidden. To make them visible you have to enable the Developer tab on the Ribbon. Here’s how to do this:

• Open a new document in Word 2011.
• Click on the Word menu and select Preferences.
• Click the Ribbon button on the bottom row on the right-hand side.
• In the Customize section, scroll through the list and insert a check mark next to Developer.
• Click the OK button.
• Click on the Developer tab on the Ribbon and you’ll see the Form Controls as depicted below.

You can now use these controls in a document. Let’s look at how to use the Text Box, Combo Box and Check Box.

The Text Box lets the form-filler type in their own answer. Click the Text Box option to insert a Text Box into your Word document. Double-click on this Text Box to control its options. For example, you could set a Maximum Length for the recipient’s answer.

The Check Box lets you create a box that can be checked by the form-filler.

The Combo Box lets you enter a list of choices that will appear in a drop-down list. The form-filler can select only one choice. After adding a Combo Box to your Word document, double-click it to be able to enter the choices that you want to offer.

The Protect Form button is very important. After you’ve finished your document click the Protect Form button. This button locks the document so it can’t be edited. In other words, it turns the document into a fillable form. Once you’ve protected the form you’re ready to distribute it to others.

Below is a picture of a sample document which demonstrates the Text Box, Combo Box and Check Box.

Would you like  to turn a word in an email message into a web page hyperlink? If you use Apple’s Mail, use these simple instructions.

• Open Mail and compose a new email message.

• Address the message and start to type the message.

• Select one or more words in your message.

• Go to the Edit menu and select Add Link.

• In the box that appears paste the web page address (aka hyperlink) and click OK. Use the picture below as a guide.

Pasting a web page address directly into your email is possible, but long addresses can really break up the flow of an email. If the web page address gets divided onto two lines then it can even break and not work when the recipient clicks on it. For example, imagine that you want to send a friend a link to a book available on Amazon’s web site. You could list the address, but it can be long and ugly. For example:

<http://www.amazon.com/The-Mac-Not-Typewriter-Edition/dp/0201782634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361854496&sr=8-1&keywords=the+mac+is+not+a+typewriter+by+robin+williams>

Using the technique I list above, you’ll be able to hide that entire address by making it a link, like this.

Hard drives are the component of a computer that fail most often. Every hard drive will eventually fail. This is why it’s so important to backup your Mac’s hard drive. It’s also prudent to periodically check the health of your Mac’s internal hard drive. I recommend two applications for this purpose: Onyx (free) and SMARTUtility (free trial, then $25).

For about the past decade, most internal hard drives have been equipped with a system that lets them monitor their own health and tries to predict failures. This technology is called S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Onyx and SMARTUtility rely on this monitoring system to help you to check on your hard drive’s health. It’s important to note that external hard drives do not include SMART technology.

Using Onyx is easy. Download the appropriate version of Onyx for your Mac. There is a different version for each version of Mac OS X from version 10.2 to the current version, 10.8. After downloading Onyx, open it and enter an administrative user name and password. This is typically your user name and password.

Onyx will then automatically present a window indicating that it will check your Mac’s internal hard drive if you click Continue. See the picture below.

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.

While viruses are not  a major risk for Mac users, it’s still prudent to have an anti-virus application installed on your Mac. Sophos offers a free Macintosh anti-virus application for use on home computers. Give it a try.

Why would you need an anti-virus application on your Mac? I can think of a couple of reasons.

1. While there aren’t many Mac viruses, there are some Mac OS X Trojan Horse viruses. I still occasionally come across some Word Macro viruses also, which were common on Macs in the late 1990s.

2. You might receive an email attachment which contains a PC virus. While this virus can’t do any harm to your Mac, would you want to pass this virus on to a friend or family member who has a PC? Sure, that person should have their own anti-virus protection, but it still doesn’t look good that you’re passing on viruses.

If you have business computers you can also use Sophos, but you’d have to buy an initial license. Sophos requires the purchase of a minimum of 3 licenses for about $34 per license. Volume discounts kick in at 10 licenses.

Check out Sophos Anti-Virus. It’s free for home users. It can detect if your Mac already has any infected files and can prevent you from getting infected in the future.

Do you use your Macintosh computer for hours at a time without taking a break? Do you end up with sore muscles or headaches? If so, you might want to consider taking rest breaks more often. Time Out is a free application that can automatically remind you to take breaks, even dim your screen to force you to take a break.

Time Out is easy to configure and every situation seems to have been taken into consideration. Time Out’s default settings will prompt you to take 15 second Micro Breaks every 15 minutes and a 10 minute Normal Break every hour. You can adjust the duration and frequency of both types of breaks or time outs. You also have the choice to postpone or skip a break. When a break occurs, your screen will begin to fade and become darker. If you take a break on your own, by not using your computer, then Time Out‘s built-in timer will reset itself. You can also configure Time Out to never initiate time outs when you’re using a specified application. For example, by default, Time Out will not perform time outs if you’re using DVD Player or Face Time. This makes sense since you wouldn’t want to interrupt your movie or a video conference. Lastly, you can manually start a Micro Break or a Normal Break using keyboard shortcuts.

If you decide to check out Time Out be aware that there are two versions. The older version requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The current version requires Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later. Dejal Systems, the developer, indicates that they are working on a new version, Time Out 2, which will add more features and will require OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). There will be both free and paid versions. Currently Time Out is distributed as freeware, and donations are welcomed and appreciated.

How should you pick an email and web hosting company? There are literally thousands of web and email hosting companies out there. How can you make an informed choice? This article lists some of the factors to consider when selecting an appropriate email or web hosting company.

This article is the third in a series about setting up email and web hosting for a new small business. The first article explains terminology. The second discusses how to register a domain name.

I’ve put together a table which lists some email and web hosting criteria which I’ve found are important to many small-office/home-office companies. My PDF table lists a handful of hosting companies and how they compare. Hopefully this table will help you develop a set of important criteria to find a hosting company that is well matched for your needs.

Let’s talk about each of these criteria in turn.

Cost – It seems that too many people select a hosting company by looking only at the cost. Maybe this is because they don’t know what other factors they should be considering. Costs can vary considerably so it should be a factor, but far from the most important factor. If you are sensitive to startup costs, check out MacHighway. MacHighway’s entry-level hosting plan for $30 per year is the least expensive plan I’ve seen. It provides 3 email accounts as well as web hosting by a very Mac-friendly company with well written help articles on their web site. This is a great value. If you want integrated calendars and contacts within your email account then Big Mountain’s Kerio Connect server is an affordable option for a start-up business that only wants 1 or 2 email accounts. The larger hosting companies often require that you sign up for a minimum number of accounts. Rackspace, for example, requires a minimum of 5 accounts and Intermedia requires at least 3 accounts.

Company Size – If you prefer to work with smaller companies where you might be able to develop a personal relationship with the hosting company, you should check out MacHighway or Big Mountain Internet. Big Mountain Internet is owned by a husband and wife and run by a small team. I don’t know exactly how large MacHighway is, but I suspect they have a few dozen employees in the entire company. When I contact them for email support, I regularly get replies from the same handful of people. HostGator, RackSpace and Intermedia are all large companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Your experience with them is less personal, but companies of this size can build networks that have greater redundancy and thus offer higher guaranteed uptime, which is an important factor to keep in mind.

Mac Knowledge – If talking to Mac-knowledgeable and Mac-friendly people in technical support is important to you then MacHighway can’t be beat and Big Mountain also has this covered in spades. MacHighway is a Mac-centric company that appeals directly to Mac users. For a large hosting company, I’ve been impressed by Intermedia’s Mac knowledge even though I know that only a small percentage of their customers use Macs.

POP and IMAP access – If you want to check your email account from more than one computer then you’ll want to use IMAP to access your email. IMAP can synchronize your Inbox and other folders across all devices. I’ve talked about the appeal of IMAP in a previous Tech Tip article. I only list hosting companies that offer IMAP accounts. Note: I’ve previously expressed my dislike for GoDaddy and I’ll point out that most of GoDaddy’s hosting plans do not include IMAP access.

Storage Space – If you’re going to use IMAP to access your email account, you’ll care how much storage space is provided by the hosting company since your Inbox and other folders will live on the mail server using up that storage space. These days it’s pretty easy to use up 1 or 2 GB of storage space after a few years. All of the hosting companies in my table provide a minimum of 5 GB of storage space. If you’re willing to spend a bit more money and work with one of the larger hosting companies then you can easily get 25 GB or even unlimited storage space.

Integrated Calendars and Contacts – If you want your calendar and contacts to wirelessly sync between your Macs, iPhones and iPads, you might want to look at a hosting company that offers Kerio Connect or Exchange accounts. Another appeal of these Kerio and Exchange accounts is the ability to have a company-wide calendar or contact list and the ability to share your calendar or contacts with other people in your company. Kerio and Exchange accounts cost more than a regular POP/IMAP email account, but BigMountain offers affordable hosting with adequate storage space. They offer accounts with 2 GB of storage space for $5 per account per month or 10 GB or storage space for $10 per account month. If you need even more storage space or some features which are only available from Exchange servers, you should consider Rackspace, Intermedia or Microsoft. Intermedia specializes in Exchange hosting and Microsoft has recently started offering Exchange hosting accounts. Their prices undercut the competition at $4 account per month for 25 GB of storage space.

Spam Filtering – All of the hosting companies offer some decent spam and virus filtering, but many charge extra to get premiere filtering.  Rackspace and Big Mountain both include their top-tier spam filtering as part of their base package. MacHighway includes SpamAssassin which is a decent spam filtering system. MacHighway’s top-tier spam filtering costs $50 per year.

Guaranteed Uptime – Many hosting companies advertise a guaranteed uptime. While this detail is important, it can also be confusing or misleading. This Wikipedia article gives greater context than I can provide here. Briefly, the higher the uptime percentage the better. However uptime does not mean the same thing as availability. In other words, a mail server may be up and running but not available to you due to a network outage somewhere. Despite Rackspace listing 100% guaranteed uptime, this doesn’t really mean that their mail servers will always be up. Every company suffers from equipment failure or earthquakes or hurricanes. Rackspace and others simply provide you a written guarantee which states that if their servers are not up and running then you’re entitled to some sort of refund of your hosting costs.

WordPress –  Web sites can be built using a variety of tools, but WordPress is a free and popular web site building tool that I recommend to many of my small business customers. If you use WordPress already or plan to use it, you’ll need to make sure your hosting company offers it. MacHighway and HostGator both include it as part of their base package. Big Mountain and Intermedia both offer it for a small additional amount of $10 or $15 per month. RackSpace offers it, but it costs a few thousand dollars per year. I was flabbergasted when I read this. It appears that their WordPress hosting is scalable and is intended for larger companies. The last article in this series will talk about other affordable ways to build a professional web site for your business.

Hosting companies are not all the same. A small business owner should think about their email and web hosting needs, then find a hosting company that is an appropriate fit. I hope this article has helped you to better understand some of the differences between hosting companies.

Here are some simple instructions on how to enlarge the size of text on a web page when you’re using Safari, Firefox or Chrome on a Macintosh computer. I use this feature on a daily basis since web sites use a variety of font sizes. This is especially handy in low-light settings or if one typically needs glasses but they aren’t handy.

All three of these web browsers support the same keyboard shortcut. While viewing a web page, press Command + (plus sign) to enlarge the text size and Command – (minus sign) to reduce the text size. If you prefer to use menu commands then go to the View menu and select Zoom In to make the text size larger or Zoom Out to reduce the text size.

Update Jan 2011: In December 2010, CrashPlan released CrashPlan version 3 which added new features like the ability to backup different files to different destinations. More importantly, it rolled the CrashPlan+ features of backups running every 15 minutes and storing multiple versions of files into the standard CrashPlan application. Thus, these two features are now standard for all users of CrashPlan.

Update March 2013: Pricing and product structure updates from CrashPlan are now correct in this article.

In my Tech Tip on how to setup a comprehensive backup system I mention that CrashPlan can be a nice supplement to an external hard drive using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner for backing up your Mac since CrashPlan’s backup data can be stored off-site on CrashPlan’s servers. Thus, it can provide automated, off-site backups of your personal data. In this article, I provide instructions on how to setup CrashPlan to perform automated, off-site, versioned backups.

I need to start by introducing and defining a few terms.

CrashPlan is the name of a backup application made by Code42 Software. It’s free for personal use and can be used to backup data to a locally connected hard drive, to another computer in your home or to another computer at your friend’s home. CrashPlan+ comes in three sizes: 10GB, Unlimited and Family Unlimited. It allows off-site backup to the CrashPlan Central servers in addition to other computers. With CrashPlan+, backups occur continuously as files change and you can configure CrashPlan to hold onto previous versions of files for a while or forever.

It’s important to know that CrashPlan is free for personal use by residential customers. That is, you’re allowed to use it to backup only personal data, not business data. If you’re a business customer then you should buy CrashPlanPro. This allows you to backup your business data to local hard drives or other computers owned by you or your friends as well as CrashPlan Central.

Setup Instructions

Start by going to CrashPlan’s web store and purchasing a license for CrashPlan+ as either an Individual Unlimited Plan ($60) or a Family Unlimited Plan ($150). The individual plan provides unlimited storage for one computer online. The family plan provides unlimited storage for all computers in one household online. When you finish the checkout procedure you’ll receive an email which contains your license code for CrashPlan+.

Download the free CrashPlan application. It works on PowerPC Macs as well as Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. These requirements may change over time to be sure to check CrashPlan’s web site for current requirements.

Open CrashPlan. You’ll be prompted to enter your user account information. You don’t have an account yet so follow the instructions to setup an account.

Once you’ve setup your account then the CrashPlan application will open.

On the left-hand side click on the Backup button. Look at the section labeled “File to Back Up.” By default it’s set to backup your Home folder. This folder is the default location for all of your music, pictures, documents, local email messages and files on your Desktop. This is typically what I recommend you back up. However, if you want to make changes to add or remove folders, click the button which should be labeled Change or Change File Section.

Once you’ve selected the files you want to backup then click on Backup on the left-hand side. In the Backup Destinations section locate “CrashPlan Central” and click the Start Backup button. The backup will start. That’s it. You’re up and running!

Remember, this initial back up could take days or weeks to complete depending upon how much data you’ve selected and the speed of your Internet connection. Until this initial backup is complete you don’t have much protection, so I’ll reiterate that I think CrashPlan is a nice supplemental backup to local backups performed by Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan offers some redundant protection and off-site protection, which is very important to have if you only backup to one hard drive using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan is also very useful if you travel and take your laptop with you since CrashPlan will run anytime your Mac has an Internet connection.

You can quit the CrashPlan application and backups will continue since CrashPlan is made up of two parts. There is the CrashPlan application, which you use to configure the backups, and CrashPlan Engine, which runs quietly, unseen, in the background. CrashPlan’s Engine automatically adjusts how much of your computer’s processing power and your network’s capacity it uses based on whether or not you’re using your computer. You can view and adjust these values in the Settings section of CrashPlan. Also in Settings, you can adjust how long versions of files are retained and your can setup files or folders to exclude from your backup data using file names or regular expressions. You can also adjust the frequency and types of email notifications which you receive.

By default, CrashPlan will send you email notices when it hasn’t been able to backup your Mac in 3 days and it’ll also send you a weekly summary of when the last backup occurred. You can change these email notification schedules in the Settings section.

As with any backup application, I recommend that you perform test file restorations regularly to ensure that the backup system is working properly and so that you’re comfortable performing restores so you can do it with confidence with disaster strikes.

Here are instructions on how to reindex your Quicken Data File.

• Open your Quicken data file.
• Open the Accounts window and then simultaneously press the Command, Option and B keys on the keyboard.
• The reindexing will begin. Once it has finished, then go to the File menu and select Save A Copy. Give your file a new name and save it to your desired folder.

You can read a more detailed explanation of these reindexing instructions in this troubleshooting article on Intuit’s web site. The article does also suggest exporting the data in QIF format and then re-importing the data into a new file if the reindexing fails or does not solve your problem.

I’ve supported many people who use Quicken, and this is the first time that I’ve had to reindex a Quicken data file. I was not even aware that Quicken included this feature. I’m pleased about this since it’s common to have to do maintenance on large database files from time to time. I wonder why Intuit has hidden this feature, but I’m glad I know how to do it now. I discovered this procedure while working with a client recently.

This client had a damaged Quicken data file that was fixed after we reindexed it. My client was a long-time Quicken user and this data file had been in use for many years. He used it to track his checking, savings and investment accounts. I provide all of this detail to indicate that this file had seen a lot of activity over many years. Apparently, out of the blue it started to give him problems. Specifically, the symptom was that he would add a transaction to one of his accounts, close and then re-open the data file and the balance for that account would have changed radically.

Intuit’s web site indicates that there are a host of symptoms which can be signs that you need to reindex your Quicken file, including these:

• Categories/classes are missing from your Categories & Transfers list.
• You are unable to assign a Category to an item in a split transaction.
• You are unable to open a backup of your data file.
• Your reconciliation is off in a previously reconciled statement and you have not made changes to previously reconciled transactions.
• Duplication or “Unknown” items are listed in the Payee column of the QuickFill Transactions list.
• You receive errors when performing a Save a Copy.