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I’ve had my Time Capsule a while now and I didn’t once regret buying this quite expensive device. (A Wifi router and a hard-disk would have been slightly cheaper, but this way it’s cleaner on my table and I do like that a lot.)

One thing I really don’t like are the hourly backups. The choices given by Apple are switching the Time Machine on and backing up automatically every hour or doing it manually. Being honest, who backs up the system manually? And even if, what would be the right amount of time in between backups?

TimeMachineEditor is a nice little app, that allows you to set the Time Machine’s schedule. This may be important for example if you’re working with Lightroom. Apparently, LR really doesn’t like backups running in the background. Besides, why would I want my Mac to be slower, when it’s running while I’m asleep anyway.

Just switch off automatic backups in the Time Machine Preferences, download and install the app, set your schedule and you’re ready to go.

I couldn’t think of a better topic for my 100th post, than something that kept me awake until I found a solution. Updating from OS3 to iOS (4), I ‘forgot’ to create a proper backup of my files. I didn’t really forget it, as I knew I don’t care about save-games and have all my contacts etc. synced. Still, I forgot something: my photos.

Once in a while, when I don’t want to take my camera with me, or simply don’t have it close by, I take photos with my iPhone camera in order to fill my Project 365 with life. When updating my phone earlier, everything was deleted, which unfortunately, also included the photos I took. Luckily enough, I’m surrounded by backups: iTunes makes backups from my iPhone. These backups again are backed up with my TimeCapsule. This again is partly backed up with Backblaze. (I guess losing my photos I took during two months of traveling through New Zealand and the USA left a mental scar.) Anyhow, here is the solution to my problem (and hopefully yours, too) and other problems that may occur if you just need certain files from a previously made iTunes backup without the need to restore the whole iPhone:

1) Download the iPhone / iPod touch backup extractor (Windows user have a similar app, which is available here).

2) Click ‘read backups’ and choose the newest one, or the one that you think is right. (Mac version – for Windows version please follow the instructions from the link above.)

3) Select the content you’d like to have (for photos it’s iPhone OS files) and click ‘extract’.

4) Once you decided where it should extract these files to, your photos are available in the folder Media -> DCIM -> 100APPLE once the extraction process finished.

I hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

Update: @ischack mentioned in the comments that it appears as if the program crashes, but he adds that the ‘beachball’ rather is an indicator for the extracting process working. Thanks

Windows Vista and its predecessors haven’t really been famous for their ability to create backups. Third party applications were and are therefore a must have, if you’d like to sleep tight without worrying about your files. Playing around with a harddisk partitioning tool – and not reading properly – I managed to delete all my files on my harddisk a while ago. Afterwards, a restauration programme confirmed that I did my job well. Luckily, I got myself Acronis True Image 2009 before this incident and stored everything important on my external drive. While it isn’t a cheap product, I found it worth the investment to secure my files automatically.

With Windows 7, Microsoft offers probably the most powerful backup solution yet, without the need to purchase extra sofware. If you’re using Windows 7 already, you might want to read the how-to from mysticgeek.