Mac 911: Free up icloud storage space, make a second backup of your Photos library, and more
Solutions to your most vexing Mac problems.
FREE UP STORAGE BY DELETING ITUNES BACKUPS OF IOS DEVICES
If you use itunes to back up your iphone, the actual backed-up data starts to pile up. Backups often run from gigabytes to tens of gigabytes, retaining anything unique on an IOS device that isn’t synced via icloud or available from the App Store. For example, if you have icloud Photo Library enabled, the itunes backup doesn’t include the Camera Roll.
Apple oddly doesn’t have an automatic “garbage cleaning” routine, or prompt to delete, or ask you if you want to delete these backups.
You can easily fill up your drive with
IOS backups, and it will feel mysterious as you won’t even know why you’re running out of storage. However, you can find these backups and delete older ones, as well as archive them on an external drive if you have a need or desire to retain them.
How to manage IOS backup files through itunes
Open itunes and choose itunes → Preference → Devices. In the Device Backups list, you’ll see a list of all the backups that are stored on your Mac. If you’re like most people, you will be amazed by how many. (In the image below, you see just one: I switched long ago to icloud backups, and had mostly deleted older archives.)
To delete older backups, I recommend using the itunes interface, as it handles everything correctly and updates the list in the process:
1. Right-click the backup name.
2. Select Delete. 3. Confirm the deletion.
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 for as many backups as you want to delete.
5. Click the OK button.
Only when you click on OK are the backups removed, and this deletion is immediate and irreversible: itunes doesn’t throw the files in the trash, but removes them from the drive.
You can instead select Archive, and itunes prompts you for a location to move the backup to.
How to access the IOS backup files on your storage device
If you want to delete the backups manually, or find them to archive them to an external drive, in the Finder either choose Show In Finder from the above menu or:
1. Choose Go → Go To Folder.
2. Enter ~/ Library/ Application Support/ Mobilesync/backup 3. Click Go.
The backups are labeled by device UDID (Unique Device Identifier), which is the unique identifier for
each IOS device. If you have multiple IOS devices you back up, this can help differentiate among them. You can find this UUID in itunes by plugging your device in via USB, clicking its icon in the itunes toolbar, and then click the Serial Number field until UDID appears.
For multiple backups, the most recent has just the UDID label, while older ones have the date (year/month/day) and time (24-hour clock plus seconds) as suffixes, as in -20181101-130144. You can move these folders elsewhere and can then drag them back if you need to restore from one of them as a backup. This may require quitting itunes and relaunching it to get the backup recognized in the Devices tab in Preferences.
YOUR MAC’S PHOTOS LIBRARY IS IMPORTANT. MAKE A SECONDARY BACKUP OF IT USING SYNC SOFTWARE
Making backups of your Mac’s Photos Library are among the more popular questions asked of Mac 911. It’s not enough for many people to have one backup made by Time Machine; a lot of you also want a manually-created backup that’s more accessible in case something goes wrong. The catch to manually backing up a Photos Library is to use a method that isn’t tedious.
The answer may lie with sync software. Sync software lets you keep files and folders in two locations (or more) up to date with each other. Sync software has been around since the earliest days of the Mac, and I’ve used many sync apps.
My current favorite sync app is Chronosync ( go.macworld.com/csyn). It’s kind of a kitchen-sink program: it can do any kind of thing you could plausibly want to do to keep things synchronized, cloned, backed up, archived, whatever. It requires a little study to master, but it’s worth it. It’s $50 but it has a perpetual upgrade license, and all future improvements are included.
How to use Chronosync to back up your Photos Library
Start by simply copying your Photos Library over to the external hard drive or whatever storage device you want to use.
(Your Photos Library is located on your Mac’s primary storage device, in a folder called Pictures.) The library is treated by macos as a package that it can copy without any difficulty. After that, you can set up a synchronization task in Chronosync.
In Chronosync, pick the primary Photos Library on your main storage device as the Source Target. Then select the library you copied to the external drive as the Destination Target. And that’s about it. Save the task and run it whenever you want. Chronosync will make sure any changes made to your primary library will be reflected in the backup.
You can also schedule tasks in Chronosync and use mounting a volume as a trigger. When you bring the volume back from offsite to update it, plug it into your Mac, and the sync operations starts.
You can keep a perfectly cloned backup, but you can also use its archive options. With Synchronize Deletions and Archived Replaced Files both checked, the destination copy of Photos Library will always resemble your live version. But any files deleted or updated have their original versions stored in an archive directory for later retrieval.
USE TIME MACHINE TO RESTORE PHOTOS YOU’VE DELETED FROM THE MAC PHOTOS APP
The Mac’s Photos app can take up a lot of storage space—actually, it’s not the app itself that uses up space, but its database of images that you have imported into Photos. So naturally, when you need to free up storage space, one way to do that is to delete photos from the Photos app.
Say you deleted some photos in
Photos, but now you need to get those photos back. And what if, after deleting those photos, you added some new ones. So now you want to restore the deleted photos, while at the same time, preserve the just-added ones. Can it be done?
Yes, but it requires a little finesse. You will also need an external drive with enough storage to restore your entire Photos Library.
If you have been performing a Time Machine backup, that could help. Here’s the primary concern: Time Machine automatically deletes older snapshots as it adds new ones ( go.macworld.com/dlte). Files that have been deleted from your Mac are only retained as long as the oldest snapshot that contained them.
Time Machine retains weekly snapshots until a drive becomes too full to keep the oldest ones. If you have a very large drive or haven’t performed any Time Machine updates in the months since you last had access to the drive, the old Photos Library’s state should be preserved.
Assuming that’s the case, let’s proceed. Apple treats the Photos Library
(located in the Pictures folder) as an integral thing: it has a single icon and you interact with it like a file. However, it contains lots of pieces, including the original versions of every imported image and video, thumbnails, an organizational database, and files that represent modifications you’ve made to images. I typically recommend not mucking around inside that package unless you have a corrupted and unrecoverable Photos Library ( go.macworld.com/oldp).
Time Machine lets you peer within the Photos Library to retrieve specific images, but I would suggest the best course of action with the highest chance of success is to retrieve the entire archived library. That requires enough storage space, of course, either on the startup volume, the Time Machine volume, or another external drive that can be plugged in at the same time as the Time Machine backup. Your best bet is to use an external drive.
Here is how to restore an entire
Photos Library.
1. Launch Time Machine, which is in
your Applications folder. If Time Machine appears in your menu bar, select its icon and click on Enter Time Machine.
2. Navigate to your home directory’s Pictures folder.
3. Navigate back in time to when you know the Photos Library was at the state you need.
4. Control-click the Photos Library to choose Restore Photos Library, and then select a destination other than where the current Photos Library lives.
5. Click Restore.
6. When the restore is complete, hold down the Option key and launch Photos.
7. When prompted, click Other Library and choose the restored Photos Library.
You can now select and export items from that restored library, and then quit and relaunch Photos with the Option key held to select your startup library, and import those images.
Another option after restoring is to instead use Powerphotos ($30; go. macworld.com/prph), which lets you merge Photos libraries. In this case, I recommend stripping all the photos from the older library that you don’t want so you can merge the slimmed-down library with your existing one—you don’t lose metadata, original images and modifications, and other data and changes that way.
1. Hold down the Option key and launch Photos.
2. Click Other Library and select your restored library.
3. Delete everything you don’t want to merge with the new library.
4. Quit Photos.
5. Launch Powerphotos and use its option to merge two libraries: your now reduced-sized old library and the current active Photos Library.
Another strategy for the future is to maintain separate Photo Library packages if you don’t have enough storage to keep everything in a single library, and want to be sure you don’t lose images or videos you would otherwise have to delete.
CAN YOU DISABLE TWOFACTOR AUTHENTICATION ON YOUR APPLE ID?
Two-factor authentication (2FA) provides an effective way to deter people from hijacking an online account. With 2FA, you supplement a password with something else—typically you enter a code that’s sent via a text message. The second factor means someone has to know both your password and have access to something you own—a phone number, a phone, or a computer—and dramatically reduces your exposure when password breaches inevitably happen.
Apple added 2FA for Apple IDS a few releases ago, an upgrade from its hastily
constructed two-step verification, which it created after high-publicity cracks using social engineering (i.e., guessing and phishing) of its icloud service.
Apple’s implementation of 2FA is integrated into IOS and macos, and I recommend that everyone enable it. However, some people may find it’s too much fuss or they have other difficulties making it work. (For Apple IDS that you don’t use with a physical device, but only for purchases, 2FA can be an honest pain, but it’s manageable.)
Until recently, you could opt to disable 2FA, although you had to go to the Apple ID website to turn it off. Apple quietly removed disabling 2FA as an option, and I’ve started to hear from people about this recently when they went to turn it off and found they could not.
It looks like Apple quietly removed that option in a later release of IOS 10 and macos 10.12 Sierra, according to reports online. Apple’s support page for 2FA notes that within the first two weeks of enabling 2FA ( go.macworld.com/twof), you can still revert. But after that, no can do: Certain features in the latest versions of IOS and macos require this extra level of security, which is designed to protect your information.
I respect this move forward for security’s sake, but I also think Apple shouldn’t have taken it out without a lot of disclosure, explanation, and potential grandfathering of those who had opted in. It doesn’t enumerate what features require this.
And Apple only provides the second factor via its IOS and macos, and as a fallback via text message and automated voice message. It isn’t integrated with standard code-based second factors (called a time-based one-time password or TOTP) or any third-party system.
It seems like Apple should have made sure its second-factor system is as easy to use and widely accessible as possible before it made it irreversible. But the new limitation is in place, and if you haven’t enabled 2FA yet, you should make double sure it meets your needs before moving forward. ■