Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

If you also need Office then that's a cheap option for cloud storage. Generally costs about £40 a year for Office plus 1TB of storage (or the Home subscription with 6x Office and 6x 1TB for about £60 a year is very cheap if you have a few people using it).

How does that work with photos, videos etc though? Do you need to do it manually or will the photos app automatically offload stuff there as well?

+1 for iCloud.
It just works.

Got a 2011 MBP with a SSD and 16GB ram, its been great up to this point but over the last couple weeks its been hanging up on mac mail, freezing and then working. Ive got like 90gb space on the SSD and I've not really been doing anything different.

Photoshop seems ok, safari seems ok but when it hangs up the full thing is like freezes, any ideas on what I should be trying?

Burn it.

@hugo7 @kboy @chrisbmx116

iCloud does seem like the best and least painful solution for me. Integration is key and do not want to faff around with other apps or services.
Do find it a bit weird that there is no "corporate" solution in Profile Manager for managing media on devices on dedicated private servers.

@aggi

No need for Office for personal things, but a good option too!

You can set it to automatically upload but I don't know if it automatically deletes the local file.

Personally I like having all my pictures on my phone so I have an alternative method for creating space. Every so often I'll copy all my photos to my computer and run them through the batch conversion on Irfanview to reduce resolution and jpg quality. This generally results in files that are about 10% of the original size (all originals are stored online) which I copy over the existing files on my phone to recover the space.

Essentially iCloud (on Apple’s servers) becomes your master library and your device is just a local cache for browsing, including thumbnails of everything, and it downloads the hi res versions as necessary. I find it works pretty well.

Thats because its consumer focussed and for folks with no real knowledge of how things work, not saying thats the best way to build things, but it works for the majority of Mac users...

Sounds like you got your own manual version of iCloud :)

I might need to rethink our complete infrastructure with networked accounts running off the server, file sharing, backups and linked ios devices. As we frequently use each others Macbook and share an iMac, keeping everything in sync has become a pain.

Just reading up about it and might be interesting if I can add a multi user iPad to the mix but unsure if that would be possible.

You can share storage within a family I believe, pretty sure that’s what I do, not sure if that would be part of your solution.

Apologies if this is one of those annoying questions but I noticed a comment a while back "not time machine".

I have iCloud backing up my phone and my email, documents and work photos from my mac book.

I also backup (periodically) to a hard drive that has Time Machine and some other storage folders. I archive (mothball) the time machine drives about every two-ish years and start a fresh one. This does waste space but it means that there are multiple copies data across the drives. I've never managed to copy the backup files so each new drive starts completely fresh.

I travel a lot and most of my work only exists digitally so a reliable backup is essential.

This has worked for me so far, please feel free to tell me what I'm doing wrong...

I think some 2010 MBPs can take 16gb RAM if you fit a certain type, would deffo consider 8gb while you’re in there. For SSD, look at Crucial. The model look-up feature at Macupgrades.co.uk is useful for checking max RAM, and other things.

Nothing inherently wrong with it and it of course depends on your storage needs. Online services are so mature now that I don't really hesitate on storing data in someone's data centre now, though, so I can't quite imagine having to plug a hard drive in.......

With that said, if you aren't already, you should periodically make sure those old drives still work. No point in having backups if you can't backup from them!

That partially happens because occasionally I need to dig down to find stuff, and of course it's usually in the oldest...

I have others stored in crates and yes, that is a good plan.

Anyone got an Apple TV for sale?

Which gen? Got an old one going

I’ve been using Brave for the last few months and forgot that I can cast using Chrome l, so I’m going to do that for now to see how I get on with Apple TV before deciding to get a box. Thanks though

My technology clear out continues.

Anybody want an Ipad Mini 4 Cellular 64GB in Space Grey? Excellent used condition. Two or three veeeeeery small hairline scratches to the screen, otherwise perfect. Battery working well.

£125

Where are you located?

SE10, happy to post at cost also.

anyone had their Mac (Macbook Pro late-2013 I think) drop internet connection but not WiFi on a certain network?

it's been happening in sporadic 5-10-minute bursts, mostly in the evening, since we changed our broadband product and router when we moved house. other devices and networks don't seem to be affected.

Burn it.