Mac OS Tools – CompTIA A+ 220-902 – 2.1

Mac OS includes a number of built-in utilities that can keep your system running at peak efficiency. In this video, you’ll learn about Time Machine, Disk Utility, Terminal, and more.

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Mac OS includes a built-in backup program that’s also easy to restore from. This is called Time Machine, and it’s something that’s integrated into the operating system itself. All you need is a place to store all of these files during the backup.

This is all automatic, so all you have to do is turn it on and Time Machine takes care of the rest. It uses this very familiar Finder User Interface in Mac OS to be able to restore the files from the date and time that’s stored in Time Machine.

You’ll see the dates along the right side of the screen. And you can simply choose which date you’d like to go back to, and it will show you all of the options for the files during that date.

If your Time Machine application can’t access the storage drive where all of these backups are stored, then it will temporarily create snapshots on your local drive. And when the Time Machine drive is now available, it will copy all of those snapshots over. In the meantime, you can restore from these local snapshots by starting Time Machine normally.

You can bring up Time Machine at any time. I could even use Time Machine you go back to a previous version of this document that I have in front of me. All I have to do is go to the top of my screen to the tiny little clock icon– that’s for Time Machine– and I can choose Enter Time Machine.

Now, my user interface is going to change to show me my current document on the left, and all of the other documents that I’ve saved on the right. And as I go back through time, I simply move up. And you can see the graphics are changing, the text is changing, and you can see the evolution of the document.

So I can go to really any specific time frame, click on a particular link, and then, if I’d like to restore it, I can click that restore. And now, I have the previous version of that document.

Instead of saving individual files in Time Machine, maybe you’d like to create an image of an entire drive or section of files. You can do that with the built-in Disk Utility in Mac OS. This will create an Apple disk image. You’ll see the file name with the extension of .dmg, and that’s how you’ll know that it’s a disk image.

You can mount this .dmg file on any Mac OS X system. Even when you’re booting up in a Recovery Mode, you can use this image file as well. You can use also a restore capability in this Disk Utility to restore the entire image back to a volume on your drive. This makes it very easy to capture a point in time of everything on your disk, and then be able to restore it exactly to the point it was when you took that image.

The Disk Utility is something that you can use for other things as well. You can certainly manage all of your disks, see the configurations for the drive, and what type of data might be on them. This can also be used to fixed problems.

You can verify and fix file systems. You can also partition and erase and manage the disks all from Disk Utility. If you ever wanted to also create, convert, or resize the images that you’ve previously created, you can do all of that in the Disk Utility.

Underneath the user interface the Mac operating system is running a derivation of Unix. So it makes sense that there would be a terminal program available to give you command line access to the operating system. The terminal utility provides this.

So if you need to perform a function that’s not available in the graphical user interface, you can go right to the terminal. If you need to run scripts, manage files, or change the configurations of utilities or applications, you can do a lot of this directly from the command line. By default, you’ll find this terminal application in the Utilities folder in your Finder.

Mac OS also includes a screen sharing feature as part of the operating system, very similar to what you might see in Windows. To be able to access this configuration, you would go to your System Preferences and choose the Sharing option. And from there, you can turn on many different sharing capabilities, including the ability to do screen sharing.

This is a screen sharing function that is also compatible with the VNC application, or virtual network computing. So you can use any open source VNC utility to be able to access the screen sharing on your Mac OS. You can see all of the devices that have screen sharing currently configured in your Finder within the Mac OS 10 operating system. Or you can access them directly by IP address or the name of the device.

It doesn’t matter what operating system you’re using, occasionally an application will stop working the way you would expect, and you’ll need to manually stop that application. With Force Quit, you’re able to list the applications that might be running on your system at that point in time, and then choose to force quit.

You could bring up the Force Quit applications by pressing Command, Option, and Escape all at the same time. Or you could go to the dock that’s inside of your operating system, right-click while holding the Option key, and then you can choose Force Quit from there.

If you’ve not used a Mac operating system before, those keys may throw you off of a bit. If you look at the Mac keyboard that I have here, you can see there’s no Alt or Windows key. Instead, we have a Control key, an Option key, and a Command key. So when we talk about holding down Option, Command, and Escape, we’re really talking about those special keys on the Mac keyboard.