For the past 9 Weeks I've been doing a series called "10 Tip Mondays" where I've given 10 Tips on various Mac Apps or OS X features. I decided to round out this series with "10 Random Mac Tips". This will be 10 Tips off the top of my head and then of course followed by the links to the other 90 Tips to make the title of this post a true statement. So here we go in no particular order:
1. Partition a drive without reformatting
One of my favorite Snow Leopard features is the ability to partition a hard drive WITHOUT having to reformat it first. As long as you're not currently booted off that drive, you can plug it in, open Disk Utility and partition it without having to reformat it. I just did this recently on an external portable Firewire drive so that I could create a second boot partition for beta testing. It worked perfectly without losing the contents. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BACKUP FIRST BEFORE DOING ANY WORK IN DISK UTILITY.
2. Multiple Time Machine Backups
Now you can have multiple Time Machine Backups. If you go to your Time Machine prefs and choose a different drive you can of course backup to it. However, if you later go back and set Time Machine to backup to the first drive Time Machine will pick up where it left off. This is great for creating offsite backups or going between two drives such as a Time Capsule at home and a portable drive on the road.
3. Use Font Book to check for damaged fonts
Weird things can happen including frequent crashes if you've got a damaged Font. You may never even know it if it's a Font that you don't use often. However, some Apps build their Font menus upon launch based on your installed fonts, so if one or more of them is damaged then you can experience issues. Luckily Font Book can check for damaged Fonts. Just select your fonts in Font Book and choose Validate Fonts from the File menu.
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