A Time Machine'tastrophe

You may have noticed lately there haven't been a whole lot of pictures on my blog. Well, this post is all about why. It's full of angst but it's not a pity party. It's so you never make the same mistake I made when it comes to backing up Time Machine on your Mac if you have a Mac.

Here's what's been going on in my world. If I told you every detail you'd tear out your hair and run screaming for the hills or want to hug me and say "Hang in there, you'll make it through this."

(BTW I'll add photos when I figure out how to use the new Adobe Photoshop I may or may not have successfully installed today.)

A few weeks ago I took my computer to an Apple Genius Bar to drop it off to be serviced. The screen display was separating from the casing of one of the bottom corners when the lid was closed. Not a huge deal but I hadn't closed the laptop in months because every time I did it made the problem worse. So, following ArtPrize I thought I'd finally take it in to be fixed. I was told to back up because my hard drive would be replaced in the process.

Now, let me say there are ways in which I'm geeky, but this was not one of them. I did what I was told to do. I went and bought an external hard drive. I plugged it in, I ran Time Machine, then I scheduled my drop off appointment.

When I got to the store I asked my Genius if there was any way to see if the hard drive had backed up properly? I wasn't sure it had so I brought it with me in case there was a way to see. His reply, with a shrug of his shoulders, was "Not really." I asked "So you just hope for the best?" To which he replied "Yes." I was told it would take 3-5 days and someone would contact me when my computer came back.

They did call within 5 days. "Great" I thought to myself. I went and picked up my computer and brought it home. That's when I realized I had no idea how to get the data from the hard drive back into the computer. A call to Apple and 30 minutes of being on hold was all it took to get going. Once the reinstallation ran I was stoked. Until I noticed all of the grey question marks in my dock. "Hmmmmmmmmmm, that's not good" I thought to myself.

Before realizing why the applications hadn't been backed up I tried to trouble shoot. I got on Google. I read forums. I ran migration assistant. I called Apple and was again on hold forever then on the phone so long we finally had to give up because I had an appointment I couldn't miss. The person there offered to schedule a call back for me, then discovered their system was down. I considered having my mom send the other back up I'd made of my computer in June and had left with her in case anything had happened to my computer while I was on the road on my way to Michigan.

And then, by chance, I discovered what went wrong.

Long story short, years ago when my hubby had set up Time Machine to run at the house he had deselected backing up my applications. I'm told that's normal, that people often do that to save back up time and storage space. But, I didn't know that. And it wasn't visible when I'd launched the Time Machine icon on my desktop. What I did realize later was that when I asked the Genius at the store if there was a way to tell if the computer had backed up properly he could have simply launched Time Machine, clicked on the "Options" button, and we would have seen right there and then that none of the applications had been backed up. I blame him. My friend Dana said it's as much my fault because it's my computer but I disagree. I told Dana I am not the expert. The Genius was the expert I was paying hundreds of dollars to to fix my computer. That I asked him point blank and he either didn't want to or didn't know to check the Time Machine Preference options was (imo) his responsibility as said expert.

So, after a lot of wasted time digging through boxes of my stuff I found most of my installation cd's. Some worked but others didn't on my current OS. Most critically I needed my Adobe suite of programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver, which is why my posts the past few days have been lacking in photos. I decided to make the leap to the new-to-me option by Adobe, their Creative Cloud which is where you pay a monthly fee to license their programs. If nothing else it keeps you up to date and would give me the additional program "Lightroom" which I think I'm going to need moving forward when I create my product lines from the images of my origami artwork. So, I called Adobe and signed up. Happy ending? Noooooooooooooooooo. . . Silly me.

Turns out my OS was old. Too old to run Creative Cloud. I was four OS's behind still running Snow Leopard. So I had to install OS X Yosemite. It took days. It wasn't like I could just hit the download and install links, I had to waste a day on a failed attempt then learn the difference between memory and storage and figure out what I was short on then make room. I also had to figure out how to find my activity viewer. Each of theses tasks took at least an hour or many hours. I kept telling myself it was all for the best. Soon I would be current and I'd stay current and this would never happen again. So, my second attempt to install Yosemite worked.

It was time to install my Creative Cloud programs. This was well over a week after picking up my like-new computer from Apple. Had I known then what I know now I would have opened a bottle of wine and put a straw in it at this point.

I am now 48 hours into trying to get the programs I purchased onto my computer. After downloading and installing the Adobe desktop app, nothing worked. Surprise. Ugh. I got on Adobe chat this morning and was instructed to de-install everything that had been installed. This took another huge chunk of time. We then reinstalled the program at which point chat disconnected us and I was on my own again. I waited for the installation to complete and same thing. Nothing. This time I called in by phone. The technician said he would be able to get the programs on my computer in 10 minutes. I think it was closer to an hour and ultimately he had to take control of my computer using remote access to get things to work.

All told it took hours and roughly 30 steps between the chat and phone interactions to get things running. Currently two programs have made it onto my computer so far but they are taking a ridiculously long time to download.

I haven't even tried to launch them. I don't think I can handle the frustration if they don't work. I'll wait for tomorrow to do that. Wish me luck. I think I'm going to need it. If the programs don't work someone is going to have to talk me out of putting my laptop under the tire of my car and running over it. That's how frustrated I've been the past couple of weeks. If I do run over my computer I'll take a picture of it but I won't be able to post it here because the very act will mean my Photoshop is still not up and running.

The moral of this story is if I never post another photo you'll know why :P Oh, and make sure your Time Machine is set to back up everything. Especially your apps or you'll be playing the same ugly, seemingly never-ending game of outdated technology dominos I've been forced to play for the past two weeks.

How does Google rank your website?

If you've ever wondered where I've learned what I know about website development, SEO, and how to improve your Google page rank and search results, today I'm going to spill the beans.

It's not a secret that demystifies the ever-changing Google algorithms that will land your website at the top of page one in Google search results. Nor is it accessible only to those of us who live in Silicon Valley. It is online, designed for novice site developers, and free which is incredibly helpful to small business owners who manage and update their own websites.

I subscribed to and watch Google Webmaster Youtube videos. Matt Cutts (Head of Webspam at Google) and his team answer the most common questions viewers send in about understanding how Google works and how to improve their search result ranking on Google. There's a huge archive of videos and watching them will only help you to become a better site manager and developer.

Here are just a sample of the videos I've learned from in the past:

Black Hat SEO - Do not believe when people say "Give me money and I'll put your site on page one of Google."

How should you name your HTML and image files? Like_this? Or-like-this? OrLikeThis? Whatever you do don't do it like this with no underscores or dashes, leaving blank spaces between the words. It will look%20like%20this%20 in the url because blanks spaces are converted to %20 creating a long and messy url.

Should you leave a new domain parked until you're ready to launch your site or put up a single page and add some pertinent content to it?

Matt discusses why good, helpful, topical content is key to creating the linkbacks that will improve your page rank.

To receive an email each time Google Webmasters uploads a new video to their Youtube channel click on the "Subscribe" button at the top of their Feed page.

How to Fix a Blank, Black Youtube Video Player on Safari

Today I took a peek at my blog and noticed my Youtube video's were missing! So I went to Youtube and instead of my Youtube channel looking like the picture above ↑

My Youtube channel looked like this.

You could see the videos in the playlist to the right but the video itself was just a blank, black screen. I tried to view my Youtube channel on Firefox and it worked just fine there. So I went on Google, did some searching and found a tutorial that had great directions about how to fix the problem which seems to be a Safari only issue.

If my videos are missing for you and you use Safari as your web browser these directions may help you too: www.online-tech-tips.com.

Begin by selecting the Safari icon in your Applications folder. Click on it and either select "Get Info" or hand key in "Command+i" to view the Safari Info window below.

Once there click on the box that says "Open in 32-bit mode."

Now quit and relaunch Safari.

When the app relaunches go to the Safari menu and select "Reset Safari" like in the picture above.

Warning: This did erase all of my preset login and passwords from my accounts like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. so make sure you have them written down somewhere.

Each box was already checked so all I had to do was click on the "Reset" button in the lower righthand corner.

At that point my Safari kind of got stuck so I had to force quit it using the Option+Command+Escape keys but when it relaunched I was able to view my videos on Youtube again! Yay!

If you've had this problem I hope this solution works for you too :)

Mac Users Be Aware of the MacDefender, aka MacProtector, aka MacSecurity Malware

While surfing Google for a recipe I clicked on a poisoned SEO query result and stumbled upon a trojan horse malware virus written for Mac users that's apparently been making the rounds for about three weeks now. (CLICK HERE for Apple Inc.'s acknowledgement of the malware threat and advice on how to avoid and remove Mac Defender.)

It's a trojan horse. . . Um, I mean apple.

Once you click on a link hosting the malware there is no obvious way to escape the browser window short of clicking a button that will download the malware onto your computer. As I sat and pondered how to escape an inescapable screen, a fake Mac looking warning came up and a fake virus scanner started running. Messages began appearing telling me my computer was infected with viruses.

HOW TO ESCAPE If you do accidentally go to a web page that tries to infect your Mac computer attempting to quit the program from your dock or using Command + Q won't work. You must force quit. Here is how to force quit: CLICK all three keys at the same time to Force Quit the installer or browser window: Option+Command+Escape

IF YOU DOWNLOAD THE MALWARE If you do click on a link, as far as I can tell, this is what will happen: Once you click on a link you will download the malware to your computer You will then be solicited to purchase fake virus protection software, voluntarily giving your credit card number to the culprits If you click to install the fake virus protection software you will then infect your computer

Now that a virus is a known problem best practices would dictate that you turn off the Safari Preference that allows all "Safe" files to automatically open after downloading. You can do this by going to Safari Preferences - General - and uncheck the Open "safe" files box.

It should look like this and click "Save."

IF YOU INSTALLED THE MALWARE Once installed the malware does three things: It can steal your logins and passwords Will try to trick you into paying for fake anti-virus software (cancel your credit card if you've already done this) Will attempt to disable any security you do have on your Mac

REMOVING THE MALWARE If you've already installed the malware here's an article about How to remove MacDefender fake antivirus program.

It's actually not a big surprise and is the price Apple is paying for its success. Everyone has always said that the Mac audience was too small for hackers to bother writing viruses for their users. But with Apple Inc.'s recent surge in popularity and profitability it was just a matter of time before Mac users would be targeted the way PC users have been for years.

FOR MORE INFORMATION • New MACDefender malware discovered for OS X