Two of my friends with Mac computers lost precious files within the past week because their hard drives failed and they didn't have their files completely backed up.

Do you have backups? Do you know how easy, simple, and cheap it is to back up your computer? What would you do if you lost all your files because your computer's hard drive failed?

Nobody wants to think about their computer breaking down! Nobody wants to spend money they don't have to on an already-expensive computer system. But it probably will happen to you. Yes, you.

On the other hand, you can buy a portable USB hard drive for less than US$100. When you get your drive, plug it in to your OS X machine running Leopard or Snow Leopard, and you'll see this prompt:

Click on the "Use as backup disk" button, and that's all there is to it!

If you want to make things even easier, you can buy a Time Capsule from Apple, or plug your USB hard drive into one of Apple's Airport Extremes and then your backups will happen wirelessly, so you don't even have to remember to plug the drive into your computer! These options are a little more expensive, but especially for laptop users they can be very handy.

The first backup will take quite a while so I suggest you set it up before you go to bed and let it run overnight. After that try to leave your drive plugged in as much as possible - at least plug it in to back up once a day. You can tell when it's done backing up several different ways, but the easiest is to look at your Finder's sidebar - when your Time Machine backup is happening, the two arrows beside the Time Machine drive will circle endlessly. Here's a snap taken while my backup is active:

Remember to click that "eject" symbol (or turn off your computer) before you unplug your USB drive each time!

For Time Machine, that's all there is to it. There's no complicated geek knowledge needed to do this! Apple designed Time Machine to be backups "for the rest of us". There are other ways to back up Mac computers, and some of them may suit some people better, but for simplicity and ease of getting started Time Machine beats everything else hands down!

So, are you getting yourself backups for Christmas this year? Can you really, truly, honestly tell yourself that spending $100 on USB backup drive now is worse than dealing with losing all your files and your assistive technology set up and your applications and your work or school files when your hard drive fails? Because odds are, you'll probably have a hard drive fail at least every 5 years - you really should take out the insurance of getting this drive for yourself. Go out now - or use the links in this article - and order yourself a hard drive or a Time Capsule. You really do deserve it.

- Ricky Buchanan

[amazondisclaim]

Keyboard shortcuts are a quick way of getting many things done without needing to access the menus or the mouse. If you know to press command-s to save your work, you've used a keyboard shortcut. For people who primarily use a keyboard or a switch interface, using keyboard shortcuts can save a lot of time and effort. MouseLess's Keyboard vs. Mouse section has some good reasons why even people who can easily use both keyboard and mouse should use the mouse less. And there are lots of people out there with repetitive strain problems who can only use a mouse with some pain, so sticking to the keyboard means they can get more done with less pain.

There are some great pages which detail keyboard shortcuts which can be used in Mac OS X. UsingMac's Mac OS X Leopard: 200+ Productivity Booster Keyboard Shortcuts is one example of many similar ones. But sometimes less is more - Karen Janowski reminded me with her efficient Shortcut Keys Handout post (for Windows users) that basic shortcuts need to be learned too. A half-page list that you can print out and refer to can be much more useful than an exhaustive list - especially for people not familiar with keyboard shortcuts.

So I've made one. This list doesn't show you all the keyboard shortcuts you'll ever need - just the ones you're likely to use many times a day. It's a half a page format that you can easily print out and refer to while you work. I'm making a PDF available for easy printing, and a version in the original Pages format for those who might want to edit it for themselves. I've also created versions in both A4 and US Letter page sizes, which should cover everybody's standard page sizes.

Basic Keyboard Shortcuts - PDF, A4
Basic Keyboard Shortcuts - PDF, US

Basic Keyboard Shortcuts - Pages, A4 [Edit, 18 December 2008: this version is now available and works properly.]
Basic Keyboard Shortcuts - Pages, US

If you edit these for yourself, let me know what you come up with - I'd love to see.

- Ricky Buchanan

BBAutoComplete adds word auto-completion to scriptable applications. You type the start of a word, press a key, and BBAutoComplete types the letters to complete the word. If BBAutoComplete guessed wrong, you can keep pressing the key to cycle through other possible completions. [...] BBAutoComplete consistently shows the same completions, and it prefers words from the same document to words from the dictionary. It's case-sensitive, to narrow the list to the most relevant completions.

The website lists these programs which BBAutoComplete is known to work with: Affrus, BBEdit (not BBEdit Lite), Mailsmith, Microsoft Word, Script Debugger 3.x, Smile, Tex-Edit Plus, TextWrangler and suggests it would be most suitable for programmers and others who work in jargon-intensive fields. It's also helpful for blogs writers, such as yours truly, who have to type weird words like BBAutoComplete which aren't things I know how to spell!

I think BBAutoComplete would be a good companion to one of the text expansion tools that we've already covered on ATMac.

- Ricky Buchanan

SmileOnMyMac has brought out a snippet pack for their application TextExpander which automatically adds accents to a list of English words. We've already written about TextExpander and some of the ways to use TextExpander but it's one of those topics where there's always more that you can write about.

Adding accented words is a great idea that you could do by hand for any text expansion tool. I have a brother whose name has an acute "tick" on the final letter, so I type accented characters quite often - they're not difficult to type with Mac OS X but not having to type them saves that little bit of time and energy.

For those who want to add those words manually to a text expansion tool, you'll need to find out how to type them using a keyboard set up for your language first. If you're not using English, I suggest checking out the typing special and accented characters article from MacCentre701 - it shows you how to activate the keyboard viewer and use it to find what special characters are available.

Here's a reminder on how to type the characters you'll need using the US, UK, or International English keyboards:

• Acute - Type option-e then the letter you need. Example: option-e a gives us é.
• Grave - Type option-` then the letter. Example: Option-` plus o gives us ò.
• Umlaut - Type option-u then the letter. Example: Option-u plus u gives us ü.
• Cedilla - Type option-c to get ç.
• Tilde - Type option-n then the letter. Example: Option-n plus n gives ñ.
• Circumflex - Type option-i then the letter. Example: Option-i plus o gives ô.

- Ricky Buchanan

MacWorld has released a great new article - Make Leopard leap: Time-saving tips for OS X 10.5 - which has a bunch of productivity tips for those using Leopard. If your disability impacts your computer use then it will take longer for you to get things done, so making sure you're saving as much time as possible means you can get more done. Make the most of what you have!

- Ricky Buchanan