karazelle
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- Mar 10, 2006
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If a problem or crisis has occured, read this.
Things you should do before a crisis.
Before: To save yourself trouble for WHEN problems occur, make sure to...
1) find a way to keep your recovery disks available
2) CREATE an extra account on your Mac, even if you are only one person using it. Do it now before it's too late. Never log in and use the account, only keep it for troubleshooting/fixing of issues that may occur. (This advice applies to Windows as well
). It is very practical if a program fails working or similar to have an account that you can log in to and try the program. If it works there, voila, problem is probably with its ~/Library/Application Support or ~/Library/Preferences/xxx.yyy.zzz.plist file. You can trash a plist file and the program will recreate it. See #4.
3) while owning two Macs is fun/cool/handy, its not always convenient from a financial angle or you may not have space for it, but if you know a friend who owns a Mac (Intel or PPC), consider getting yourself a standard firewire cable in case an issue would occur. See #6 here for how this is done.
4) DO take backups.
Take backups of your documents and music.
iTunes: You CANNOT re-download music or movies you bought. Back them up! You agreed to this in the licence agreement. Apple has Time Machine in Leopard that works with any random USB or Firewire disk on the market. You don't need the expense of Firewire for backups (however, FW is a must for working on large files on the disk). Or get Time Capsule.
Things people tend to forget to backup: Bookmarks (if you have .Mac it takes care of it for you when you enable it, for other browsers there are plugins in both Opera and Firefox).
Apple Mail - it is stored in ~/Library/Mail
Contacts, Calendars, Photos, product registration keys/numbers for software you bought. I put a copy of all my registration info by mail in Gmail and on my iDisk.
Deleting Apple software, using Software hacks, betas etc: if you want to delete/replace Apple bundled software in /Library or /Applications, do take a backup. Just right click the application and "Archive". You get a .zip file that you can put somewhere safe.
5) Installing an update through Apple Software Update is usually fine, but it MAY cause a problem. To get out of such a situation, the normal plan is usually: a) Get the "combo update" from Apples website, a fairly large file, but it usually fixes things. b) See #4.
6) NEVER delete stuff from /Applications/Utilities unless you absolutely know you can (like old iPod Updaters or firmware updaters). Avoid deleting stuff in /Applications that you came with the system. Updates may/will expect them to be there or put them back. If you want desperately to delete Safari, you can always right/ctrl click an application and Archive it, then put the Archive somewhere safe.
7) Just never mess in /System. Really, do not.
Things you should do before a crisis.
Before: To save yourself trouble for WHEN problems occur, make sure to...
1) find a way to keep your recovery disks available
2) CREATE an extra account on your Mac, even if you are only one person using it. Do it now before it's too late. Never log in and use the account, only keep it for troubleshooting/fixing of issues that may occur. (This advice applies to Windows as well
). It is very practical if a program fails working or similar to have an account that you can log in to and try the program. If it works there, voila, problem is probably with its ~/Library/Application Support or ~/Library/Preferences/xxx.yyy.zzz.plist file. You can trash a plist file and the program will recreate it. See #4.3) while owning two Macs is fun/cool/handy, its not always convenient from a financial angle or you may not have space for it, but if you know a friend who owns a Mac (Intel or PPC), consider getting yourself a standard firewire cable in case an issue would occur. See #6 here for how this is done.
4) DO take backups.
Take backups of your documents and music.
iTunes: You CANNOT re-download music or movies you bought. Back them up! You agreed to this in the licence agreement. Apple has Time Machine in Leopard that works with any random USB or Firewire disk on the market. You don't need the expense of Firewire for backups (however, FW is a must for working on large files on the disk). Or get Time Capsule.
Things people tend to forget to backup: Bookmarks (if you have .Mac it takes care of it for you when you enable it, for other browsers there are plugins in both Opera and Firefox).
Apple Mail - it is stored in ~/Library/Mail
Contacts, Calendars, Photos, product registration keys/numbers for software you bought. I put a copy of all my registration info by mail in Gmail and on my iDisk.
Deleting Apple software, using Software hacks, betas etc: if you want to delete/replace Apple bundled software in /Library or /Applications, do take a backup. Just right click the application and "Archive". You get a .zip file that you can put somewhere safe.
5) Installing an update through Apple Software Update is usually fine, but it MAY cause a problem. To get out of such a situation, the normal plan is usually: a) Get the "combo update" from Apples website, a fairly large file, but it usually fixes things. b) See #4.
6) NEVER delete stuff from /Applications/Utilities unless you absolutely know you can (like old iPod Updaters or firmware updaters). Avoid deleting stuff in /Applications that you came with the system. Updates may/will expect them to be there or put them back. If you want desperately to delete Safari, you can always right/ctrl click an application and Archive it, then put the Archive somewhere safe.
7) Just never mess in /System. Really, do not.