The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

There are many ways to lose important data, and not just on your computer (where did I put my keys?). While it is almost always unexpected, and we as computer-users are often unprepared - occasionally data-loss occurs in ways that make you sit back and consider the infinite.

Recently at the OnDeckTech 24×7 help desk, I received a call from a customer who was upset, suspecting she had just potentially lost a TON of very valuable data. A video editor here in Chicago, she has a 15″ Powerbook with an 80GB HD, two Maxtor 300GB External Drives, and one 160GB LaCie Porsche drive. ALL of which fell victim to one of the most bizarre disasters I have encountered.

Have you ever longed for finding similar tunes based on your favorite artists & songs in your iTunes library? It’s only a click away as Pandora’s free web-based music player allows you to do just that!

Created by the Music Genome Project , Pandora offers continuous musical suggestions based on a vast library of song titles that are rated as a as a match for each station (artist or song title) you input into the player. Pandora also allows you to rate & skip songs, which assists in guiding a playlist fitted to your particular tastes while also allowing you to save stations so you can browse different styles of music without leaving the player. If you hear a song you’d like to own, direct links are available to Apple’s iTunes store, as well as Amazon.

Ever wonder what the /Library directory is for, and why there’s more than one of them?

The time has come. The time is now. I’m reviewing the basics, getting ready to recertify as an Apple Certified Systems Administrator (ACSA) for 10.4, Tiger, yes, just about in time for Leopard, 10.5 to come out (Spring actually seems very, very far away at the moment). It actually doesn’t come at too bad a time, I’m working less this week to help my wife with our new, third baby, and I’ve got time at all sorts of odd hours now to review technical details, and share tidbits with you!

Ebrahim Ezzy writes a good primer on what he calls Social and Enterprise Groupware, at the Read/WriteWeb blog.

One of the useful things Ezzy does in this article is differentiate between different types of collaboration software, such as contrasting conferencing, file sharing, project management, calendaring, contact-sharing… all can be called Groupware, and all certainly help teams to collaborate.

Zimbra WSJ article.
Where we learn more than the name comes from the Talking Heads song (actually called “I Zimbra”, from their cerebral Fear of Music).

In this step-by-step, we’ll walk through backing up Microsoft Entourage 2004 data in Mac OS X. Before we begin, know that Entourage groups, notes with multimedia items, and category information for everything except contacts cannot be saved in the backup file.

To create an archive of your Entourage identity, click on the File menu and click Export:

This will bring up an export window in Entourage. Select Export items to an Entourage archive and choose the items you wish to backup. In this example, Entourage will back up all items:

Among the principles that may guide your deployment of enterprise collaboration software (aka “groupware”) such as Zimbra, many experts agree having a sense for the value of such a solution to your company should be your first priority.

Your team may be just you, your laptop and PDA, or it may many coworkers spanning the globe… how do you not only measure your company’s ability to communicate under day-to-day, common, often less-than-ideal circumstances, but also understand the prospective value of investments meant to improve collaboration?

A good thing to do prior to first synchronizing your calendars and address books with .Mac or Zimbra here’s how to back up Apple’s iCal & Address Book data in Mac OS X 10.4.

Backing up iCal:
First, launch iCal and select File > Back up Database:

A window will appear in iCal requesting where to save the backup file to:

This will create a backup file of iCal:

After creating your backup file, store it safely on an external hard drive or burn the data to CD/DVD. To recover from your backup file, simply navigate to File > Revert to Database Backup and select the backup file.

Apple allows you to authorize five machines to play music and video purchased from a single iTunes store account. While most people don’t have five different machines of their own from which they play five different iTunes libraries - it is still very easy to run out of authorizations. It’s easy to lose track. You might give four different songs to four different friends, and you’re done. Four of your five authorized machines are not even yours. Not to mention remembering to deauthorize your iTunes account before selling or giving away a computer (it doesn’t happen automatically when you clean install the OS).

Looking for a deal prior to the holidays? Gearing up for the season, the Apple Stores seem to be cleaning out their inventory of computers that were either on the floor as demos, or systems that were returned by customers because they changed their minds for some reason within the 10-day return policy.

The AppleCare on these demo and refreshed systems is as new, 90-days complimentary phone support and 1 year hardware support, or 3-years with the purchase of AppleCare Plan for computer systems (an available option for all demo and refreshed systems).