I’m trying to share a Time Machine volume with another Macbook on my home network but it’s not working. I’ve tried Google, and read through a few Reddit threads, but I haven’t been able to get it to connect. So, I asked Perplexity for help. It helpfully listed a number of things I could try, but then I saw tip number seven. When you look up advice online, don’t copy and paste any instructions into your computer without knowing what it does. What does sudo rm -rf /Volumes/* do? It recursively deletes everything in your /Volumes folder. A little bit […]
Mac
Pause Time Machine for large files?
Warning: this is potentially terrible advice as it disables your backup system temporarily, or until you remember to enable it again. It also deletes backups which might be needed if you need to restore a file that was modified during this period. When downloading massive files like the 50GB tgz archives from Google Takeout on your Mac, you might consider temporarily pausing Time Machine backups. This can help avoid the creation of enormous snapshots that quickly consume your free space. It’s a bit perplexing, though—my Time Machine backup disk is always connected, so I’m unsure why snapshots are generated at […]
Mac
How to: a keyboard shortcut to lock your Mac
For many years, I was using a hot corner to lock the screen of my Mac, but I always wished there was the equivalent of Windows-L in Windows to do it. I have no idea when this keyboard shortcut was added, but tapping the CTRL-CMD-Q shortcut will lock your Mac screen. Apparently, if you have a small magic keyboard, then CTRL-Shift-Eject will do the job too. This Stack Exchange Question shows the shortcut wasn’t available in 2015. Users had to resort to all sorts of tricks to lock their screen with the keyboard. An updated answer from 2019 reveals the […]