Senior Contributor, Macworld
If you’re a 1Password user, you likely enjoy the ability to make unique, strong passwords for every account you have to manage or create. Unique passwords make it enormously unlikely that a single breach of a site at which you have an account, even a catastrophic breach, would let attackers leverage that information to log into your accounts elsewhere.
However, there’s a problem seen routinely that’s easy to fix: 1Password sometimes loses its connection to a syncing archive. 1Password has a few ways to keep vaults in sync. Some people use the 1Password.com vault for everything, which allows them to access their passwords from a web browser, as well as from end points, like an iPhone (or Android phone) or desktop computer.
You can also opt to sync via Dropbox, which works across all supported platforms; iCloud, for Apple-ecosystem syncing; or even via Wi-Fi over your local network. With Dropbox and iCloud, 1Password stores its heavily protected vault in a special sort of file and tries to put it in a standard location. With Dropbox, that’s Apps > 1Password.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
If you’ve used previous tools such as iPhoto and Aperture for managing your photos and videos, you can wind up with many libraries and miscellaneous files, and be unsure whether you have a definitive set of photos that’s not full of wasteful overlaps.
That’s the case for Macworld reader John, who has libraries across several software programs and piles of backups to boot. He’d like to consolidate everything in one place and de-duplicate, so he has an authoritative set. He wonders if he’ll wind up needing a huge drive to manage all this, too. (Probably!)
Apple offers no real help with this, except recognizing duplicates of certain kinds when importing images from another source. You need to turn to third parties for help. My best recommendation here is PowerPhotos from Fat Cat Software, a unique app that contains a lot of tools you might have hoped Apple would have built into Photos by now, including library merging and de-duplication of media. It’s $30 and it’s worth every penny.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
File transfers between iOS devices typically rely on iCloud, which can be inefficient if all you have are iOS devices and no desktop to act as a conduit.
Macworld reader Patty wrote in with one such quandary. She has a bunch of music files on her work iPad, but she’s leaving that job and returning it. Patty wants to transfer that music to her personal iPad, but doesn’t own a computer. What to do?
The only way I can think of to transfer without a desktop system in sight is to use iTunes Match, which is $25 for a one-year subscription. Even then, this won’t work without a Mac or Windows copy of iTunes in the mix, but I’ll tell you why in a moment.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
Apple’s integration of iCloud into all its services and the availability of iCloud Drive makes it an attractive sync and storage option. You can use it to make sure your contacts and events are up to date across your Macs and iOS devices, and reachable via iCloud.com. Your photos and videos automatically upload for backup, and your passwords and other secret data gets securely synchronized on all your hardware—in a way that even Apple can’t peer into. You can even offload files on your Desktop and in your Documents file if you start running out of storage in macOS.
But there’s a problem: Apple doesn’t offer any way to let you backup the data for which it has the only copy. And, in many cases, you may have a mix of information that could make it hard to restore, even if you have a full copy.
Macworld reader Mana wrote in about this particular issue. They asked for a method to backup iCloud Drive in particular, but the same issue applies more broadly to all iCloud services except iCloud Keychain and the People album’s facial ID in Photos (as I’ll explain below). Mana noted, quite accurately, “Good comprehensive backups would seem to be a vital precaution that we should all take.” Bravo.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
FileVault offers the fantastic option in macOS to encrypt your entire drive. With modern Macs, starting now several years ago, that whole-disk encryption allows nearly the same performance as with an unencrypted drive due to hardware-based accelerated cryptographic calculations.
To avoid losing your files forever if you forget your password or lose it from a stored location, macOS offers to either reveal to you a special Recovery Key that you have to make a record of, or—starting with Yosemite—lets you use iCloud to unlock your drive. (There’s a special Mavericks-only option that requires answering security questions; read this Apple support note for details, especially the footnote at the end.)
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
I sometimes forget how many working Apple displays of all vintages remain out in the world. What reminds me is the regular email from Macworld readers asking about connecting them up to the Thunderbolt 3 MacBook Pro laptops that Apple started shipping in late 2016.
Today’s question is about power, but because we receive so many queries, I want to review the overall legacy display issues for everyone, before digging into that specific answer.
The current series of MacBook Pros offer super-high-speed Thunderbolt 3 connections over the USB-C plug standard, and can work with a variety of monitors that support DisplayPort, a now long-running video display protocol, via direct USB-C connections and through adapters.
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Senior Contributor, Macworld
Macworld reader Dave writes in on behalf of his wife, who is apparently happy with the iOS that shipped on her iPhone 6s. But she now has an iPhone 8 Plus, and wants to move the background from old version of iOS to the latest, running on her new device. He wonders if there are any pitfalls.
It’s an interesting question, and one I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer to.
The iTunes and iCloud backups typically contains a relatively small amount of specific data, like encrypted passwords or file settings, and largely comprise either media files or instructions on what to sync or download from where, including apps.
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