Here’s how to make a Mac back up to a specific drive when you use more than one drive with Time Machine. Plus what “Back Up with Consistency Scan” means.

Run into the “The operation can’t be completed because the item “bands” is in use” error while trying to delete an old Time Machine backup? Here’s what to do.

If you’ve suddenly been unable to connect to your Time Capsule or other backup drive, getting the error “There was a problem connecting to the server … Check the server name or IP address, and then try again. If you continue to have problems, contact your system administrator”, here’s what to do.

Want to back one Mac up to another? Or backup a Macbook up to an iMac? Or a Mac desktop? Whether you have a Macbook Air, a Macbook Pro, a Mac Mini or an iMac, here’s how to make Time Machine back up one Mac to second Mac, instead of a Time capsule or other external drive, and how to get Time Machine to recognize the target Mac or Macbook as a valid backup disk.

Almost nothing is more frustrating than spending two days keeping your Macbook laptop in one location while it does a first-time Time Machine backup to your Time Capsule – especially when it’s not really a first-time backup, because you already have a perfectly good backup on your Time Capsule but your Macbook Air or Macbook Pro won’t recognize it, so it starts all over. We say “almost nothing” because what is even more frustrating is waiting that two days, only to have the backup stop before the full backup is complete, and having to start all over. Or completing that full backup, and then Time Machine still can’t connect to the new full backup, and wants to start another new one. If any of this has happened to you, here are simple, step-by-step instructions for what worked for us to force Time Machine to both complete a full backup to a Time Capsule, and to recognize that backup and use it, after going from OS X Lion 10.7.5 to Mountain Lion 10.8.2.

If you are reading this article, it’s likely because your Macbook Air or other Apple Mac laptop has started freezing up on you, or has slowed to a crawl and is grinding away, or you may even seem to be out of disk space. If any of these are your issue, a good place to start checking is with your Mac’s ‘mobile backups’, which, despite the name, aren’t backups for your mobile devices onto your Mac, but rather are backups that your portable computer (i.e. laptop) makes to itself when you are away from your Time Capsule or other backup drive.

You may have noticed that you can hear your computer being backed up via Time Machine, but then you look at the Time Machine icon in the status bar, and it’s not spinning, leading you to wonder “huh?” Here is why your Time Machine icon is no longer rotating in your status bar.

Here at TIP we are a broadly Mac shop, and we do love our Apple computers. But that doesn’t mean that they never fail, and recently we learned the hard way that there are some known issues with certain repairs – Mac gotchas, if you will – that will get you every time. Such is the case with having your logic board replaced, which will cause problems for you with Time Machine and iTunes, because it changes your computer’s MAC address, on which Time Machine and iTunes rely to authenticate your computer. The biggest issue we see is that Apple knows about this, and doesn’t warn the customer before swapping out the logic board. A simple warning from Apple before replacing a logic board could save Apple customers hours – days even – of stress, heartache, and futile searching and effort; but Apple doesn’t give their customers that warning. So, we are giving you that warning – here’s our word to the wise.

Are you “waiting for Time Capsule to restart” while you are trying to set up Time Capsule to add itself to your existing wireless network, only to find that Time Capsule never does restart? And then, when you hit “rescan” it can’t find the Apple Time Capsule at all, even though it had just found it moments before? Here’s what to do.