macOS includes a number of different utilities that can assist with the overall management of the operating system. In this video, you’ll learn about Time Machine, Disk Utility, and other useful macOS features.
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Apple’s Mac OS includes a built-in backup program called Time Machine. Time Machine is designed to keep you a backup of your system every hour for the last 24 hours. So for the last day, you can go back to any hour and recover any of that data. Time Machine also provides daily backups for the last month, and you can go back in time as long as you’d like to get a weekly backup. This rolling backup process continues to run until you fill up your backup drive, and at that point, it will begin deleting the oldest data, as newer information is backed up.
If you need to perform any disk maintenance in Mac OS, you would use the Disk Utility. This is not something that’s commonly scheduled, however. This is really something that’s used as needed. If you’re running into problems with the drive, you may want to use the first aid function within Disk Utility, which is very similar in function to the Windows Check Disk utility. The first aid function will examine your drive, make sure all of the file permissions are set properly, and ensure that the operating system is able to operate properly using that particular drive.
There are also other functions in the Disk Utility, such as partitioning and erasing, and you can restore an unmount drives from this interface, as well. There are also other functions available [? in ?] Disk Utility. If you get a new drive, you may want to partition and erase that drive, and you can do that using the built-in tools in Disk Utility.
Mac OS centralizes as all updates for both the applications and the operating system into one utility. This is the Mac OS App Store, and inside the App Store, there is an Updates option that can show you any applications that need updates and any applications that have recently been updated. This process occurs automatically, but you can also set this process to be manual. You would then start the App Store, look at the Updates section, and you would need to manually select the applications that needed an update. This is also where all of your operating system patches will be managed. So if there is part of the operating system that needs to be installed or you’d like to see recent installations that have been made, you can find that all in the App Store.
The internals of the operating system are intentionally invisible in Mac OS. As an end user, you don’t work directly with device drivers or deal with the intricacies of installing new printer drivers. Instead, all of that information is hidden from view and happens automatically in the operating system. You can get some insight into what hardware is seen by the operating system by looking at the hardware section of System Information.
This gives you a detailed list that’s broken out by category so you can see what drivers may have been loaded, so the operating system can use that hardware. This is a view only or read only mode. There’s is no configuration changes that can be made here, and there is nothing that you would have to input into the System Information to be able to gather these details. All of this is by design. In Mac OS, the end user doesn’t deal with any aspect of getting the system running. They can focus instead on using the operating system.
Unlike the Windows operating, system Mac OS does not include an antivirus or anti-malware application as part of the operating system. There are a number of third-party antivirus and anti-malware applications from the big antivirus companies, and those can be installed with Mac OS. There are far fewer threats attacking Mac OS than you would find with an operating system like Windows, but you still need to protect your operating system from these attacks and be sure that your data is going to remain safe.
Once your antivirus and anti-malware is installed, you want to be sure that you’re getting the latest signatures, so it’s not uncommon to set updates to be every hour. That way, you know you’ll have the latest signatures to be able to protect against all of the emerging threats.