MAC Tips!

So today I decided it was time to find out how to take the music from my iPod and get it on my computer. A few months ago my Mac PowerBook died and I had to do a fresh OS install. First time in the 8 years i have owned the machine. When I did this install I lost a lot of music. A lot of things I collected on my two iPods over the course of the years and only had backed up on my old PowerBook and not my newer MacBook Pro. So today I set out to get that music back. And I did!

So I started knowing there were some programs I could buy out there then I scratched my brain and thought "There has got to be a free one as well."


So I did a super fast Google search and the first one that popped up was an article from Mac World DOT com. And wouldn't you know, IT WORKED!


I used the Mac method. I really didn't even read the PC one because well, I don't own one. I am actually copying my music to my work computer now (Mac Pro), so I can stop bringing and forgetting my iPod at work. Tomorrow I transfer my other iPod.

The main tool that this walk though had me use is called TinkerTool. I like this program a lot. I mean I really like this program a lot. It allows you to see hidden or "invisible" folders and files on you computer. And that is just what the music folder is on your iPod, invisible. Apple just makes it that way so the average user can not rip music back from your iPod, well really from other peoples iPods. They do not want you to "Steal" music. As the Mac World article states, he sees more people trying to get their music back after a computer crash than trying to steal music from someone else's iPod. And that is exactly what I was trying to do.

Most of my music was ripped from my CD's I bought years ago. And well they went the way the CD has been travailing..... lost in the waist land. So I either had to buy the same music again, which is not very frugal, or get it back from a device I payed hundreds of dollars to own. So I went with the latter, and am very satisfied.

Now I also noticed another little problem at work today. I was running out of hard drive space!

So if you use TimeMachine on OSX 10.5 or 10.6 watch your hard drive space. I noticed to day that I only had 15 gigs left on my second hard drive. Now I have a lot of video and audio because, well I am a video editor. But that is all spread out over there massive amount of hard drive space I have in this machine and across my network. So when I saw I only had 15 gigs left after only 5 months of having this machine I got worried. Of course after poking around I saw a folder labeled "Backups.backupb" and low and behold there were piles of files in there! My main hard drive was backed on there up sense June! Over 250 gigs worth at this point! And there are more files still deleting!

The folder wasn't even visible until I got Tinker Tool earlier today to get songs form my iPod. So I made it visible and I was able to see all the back up files. To make this worse, you can not edit the amount of saves, intervals of saves or how long the backed up files stay on your drive in the TimeMachine settings. But you can go out and download this nifty tool that lets you customize time machine. It's called TimeMachineScheduler.

I'll let you know how well it works in a few days after I am running it. It allowed me to set up how many times a day the computer backs itself up by setting the intervals in between the backups. It also allowed me to not back up between certain hours of the day. And seeing how this is a work machine and I am not using it between 5 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. it will not back up during those times.

OK, it is almost time to get out of here for the day. I wanted to share the two tips I learned today. I hope someone out there can find them useful.

That is all, carry on.

ok enough of this rant. i figured i am in a Mac help mood today, so i figured i would give out some more tips i learned today.