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Six ways to protect your files and avoid window overload

1 Encrypt a USB drive

Back up the drive, then open Disk Utility, select it on the left and click Erase. Set its scheme to GUID, format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) for the broadest macOS compatibility or APFS (Encrypted) for 10.13 up, confirm, and set a password.

4 Quickly quit apps

Hold ç and press † to open the app switcher. Press † repeatedly until the app you want is selected, then release ç to go to it. However, the switcher has other uses. Press Q to quit the selected app, or H to hide its windows, which will return when you next switch to that app.

2 Accidental trashing

It’s especially easy to delete an important file when trying to free up storage space. Select one in Finder, choose File > Get Info, tick Locked in the top group and then close the Info window. Finder will want confirmation if you try to put the file in the Trash.

5 Organise Safari tabs

With quite a few pages open, Safari’s tab bar can get disorganised, making it hard to find what you want. The visual overview can help, but for a little help to tidy things up head to Window > Arrange Tab By. This menu contains options to sort tabs by title or, more helpfully, by website.

3 Quickly close windows

If you’ve opened a lot of tabs or windows in an app and want to close them all, you needn’t press ç+W repeatedly. Instead use ≈+ç+W to close all at once. If any docs haven‘t yet been saved at all, you’ll be asked to confirm what to do with them.

6 Minimise clutter

It’s easy to end up with a bunch of Finder windows cluttering the desktop. You can help yourself to avoid this by holding å when doubleclicking a file to open it. Finder will send the file to the corresponding app as normal and close its own window at the same time.