The title itself is nearly impossible to obtain but we have one solution for you that might actually come close. It’s as easy as Time Machine (well, it sort of is Time Machine) and one piece of hardware. Most people are perfectly suited with an external hard drive connected to their Mac via firewire. With Mac OS 10.5 or 10.6 you can turn on Time Machine and have it take periodic snapshots of your machine. After the initial backup, it will check your computer each hour for changes and backup only those changes. Time Machine keeps a backup each hour for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month. It’ll keep the backups as long as you have space — if you run out, it will start deleting the oldest snapshots.

When you start considering laptops, it becomes very easy to forget about your backup. Plugging in an external drive isn’t very accessible if you’re dragging your laptop everywhere you go. It becomes a little less of a hassle with a portable firewire drive. Backups are quick and they’re tiny enough to fit in your bag… but you still have to plug something whenever you want to back up. So how do we fix that?

A great way start is with NAS (Network Area Storage). NAS allows you to connect to your storage space over the network. Depending on your setup, you can drag and drop important files to your NAS or use a Time-Machine-compatible device that will allow you to run full backups over the network. With NAS, you could come home each day and backup your computer without ever thinking about it. Time Machine will recognize that your backup drive is available once you connect to your home network and start backing up that day’s activity. It’s really a set it and forget it option. Pretty cool.

Apple offers a NAS solution that most people have deemed unworthy of data protection: Time Capsule. It offers all of the network and backup features we outlined above, but what happens when it fails? You lose your backup. There’s no way to access the hard drive in the Time Capsule without voiding your warranty. Apple is happy to swap it for a refurbished device, but you’re not getting your data back. What happens if it fails at the same time as your internal hard drive? You lose all of your information. You could take it to a professional data service like Data Tech Labs: they’d try to recover the information but at that point you’ve lost a $300+ device and a bunch of money on data recovery. So, that doesn’t really keep everything safe… there has to be something better, right?

There is. This is not a cheap solution and wouldn’t necessarily be the best solution for at-home use but it is very practical for your business… or even a tech-oriented family. If you have a lot of computers in your business or on the same home network, this would be an ideal backup solution for you. You can have all of the network and ease-of-use features as we listed above… but with a little more data integrity.

In April, Data Robotics introduced a NAS called the Drobo FS. Let’s cover some of the features that will make this more stable than any other option currently available to the average consumer.

Drive Redundancy — We won’t get into everything that is RAID in this post, we’ll just tell you that this device allows you to choose what type of protection you want. You don’t have to mirror drives at all… you could give yourself up to 10TB of network space if you’re not concerned about redundancy. If you want extra protection, you could install four 2TB hard drives for a nearly infallible system with 4TB of network space.

Self-Healing Technology — The redundancy this product features would allow two separate drive failures without any loss of data. If you find yourself with one, even two failed hard drives… don’t sweat it. You can just toss in another hard drive and it’ll start rebuilding your RAID without any stress from you.

Time Machine Support — Just yesterday, May 20th, Data Robotics announced full Time Machine support for the Drobo FS. This means that you can use it just like any other drive via Time Machine… but over the network like the Time Capsule.

Drobo Apps — This one is more for the media enthusiast. Drobo has applications that will help you stream media from computer to computer and even setup an iTunes media network share.

We realize that this backup solution isn’t for everyone… it’s just the best solution we’ve seen in a long time. The enclosure itself starts at $699. If you want to order it with hard drives pre-installed, that could run the total up to $1,499. That may seem like a lot for data integrity, but let us remind you that data recovery can run you upwards of $1,000 per drive. We’re not trying to scare you (maybe a little), we just want everyone to take data backup seriously. In fact, we’ll make less money if you follow our advice. So, what does that tell you?

That’s about it. We know that’s a lot to take in. We want you to know that we’re here for you. If you decide to grab a Drobo FS, we’d be happy to come out and help you set it up. This article was part of our How-To series. We’ll keep updating it with helpful information all the time. Soon, we’ll have a step by step guide for a regular time machine backup with a normal external hard drive. Should we have done that one first? Maybe… it just not as interesting.

Here’s a video from Data Robotics about the Drobo FS. If you’re at all considering the device, you should watch the video and be amazed.

Very soon, all of us — not just iPad users — will be able to download iBooks from the iTunes Store and view them on our Apple mobile device of choice. iPad users, obviously, already have this feature. iPhone and iPod touch users will see this addition when iPhone OS 4.0 comes out sometime this summer. For now, this article applies to the iPad users, but the rest of us will be joining them shortly.

Project Gutenburg has made 30,000 books available to iBookstore users for free! That means that I could literally read for the rest of my life without spending any more money on books. However, these books are generally old and all public domain, so… I’ll probably still buy new books. In fact, I’m more of a paperback guy myself, but there’s nothing like bringing 20 books with you and being able to start and stop wherever you want without having to worry about marking the page. Project Gutenburg converts older books into digital format and their efforts allow for people to read them on nearly any digital reading platform. The one thing that isn’t always included or may not be public domain is the book cover artwork. After downloading some the classic books that I wanted to read, I noticed that my iBooks library wasn’t very pretty: nothing but the default images from Apple.

My OCD doesn’t allow that.

In order to add book covers to your iBooks, just follow the bulleted steps listed below. It’s actually very similar to the album art article we wrote a few months back. Anyways, the steps:

• Find the book cover image you’d like to use via Google image search or another search engine.
• Right-click and copy that image to the clipboard.
• Find the corresponding book in iTunes, right-click it and choose “Get Info”.
• A new window will pop up. In there click over to the “Artwork” tab.
• Click the empty space and paste the image.
• You should see your image in the window. Click “Okay” and you’re done!

It’s really that easy. Unfortunately for my OCD, books come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and aspect ratios so there’s absolutely no way to make it look perfect like my Music and Movie collection. Don’t forget, you can follow these same steps if you don’t like the default cover art that comes with your iBook. Some of us grew up looking at different cover art than others… so just find the one that suits you best and you’ll be set.

Please let us know if you have an questions or comments about this article. Otherwise, you can follow @rmmrdenver on Twitter. All of our articles come through as Tweets, so feel free to reply to our posts with questions or comments on Twitter.

If you’re like me, the above picture is driving you crazy.  You’ve done all of the basics to make your albums as organized as possible including cleaning up the titles, correcting genres, and pressing the “Get Album Artwork” button (Secondary click the track or select the whole album… right click, it’s near the bottom) but for one reason or another iTunes won’t apply any artwork to your favorite album.  Maybe it’s something obscure, maybe the artwork database just doesn’t recognize the album title or artist you chose… now what?  Here’s a quick pictorial guide to help you make your albums look beautiful just like their track names. (Yes, I know Monkey Business by the Black Eyed Peas would find the artwork just fine… it’s just an example)

First, make sure that you have done the simple things… Click the “Advanced” menu in iTunes and then make sure you’ve clicked the “Get Album Artwork” button there.  That button will actually search through your entire library and make sure you have artwork for every album.  It isn’t perfect, but it sure beats doing all of this manually like me.  That was 4 years ago before “Get Album Artwork” even existed. Make sure you’re clicking the illustrations if you need a larger example.

You’ll probably still have albums without album art due to variances in titles and tracks. If so, we continue on to the next step. Choose an album… I’ll be doing Black Eyed Peas’ Monkey Business as my example. Open your browser and navigate to Google. Google has a really handy Image search that will be helping us out tremendously. Click the Image button in the top left of the browser window: this will let Google know that we’re only looking for pictures. It should show you the “Google Images” logo now. Go ahead and click in the search field and then type the Artist and the Album, in my case “Black Eyed Peas Monkey Business.” It’ll probably try to guess what you’re searching for as shown in the picture below; it’s okay to go ahead and click one of those if you think it will match. Then click the “Search Images” button.

You should see a whole bunch of pictures for the album you’re trying to fix, but I have a few suggestions you should consider before choosing the first one. You always want to use proportional album art, like 400 x 400. That’s the pixel size of the image. If it’s proportional, it will probably show up just fine in iTunes… if not, you may have white space lining the artwork. So find a picture that’s proportional and click it. This will take you to the website that is sharing that picture. The picture can be difficult to find in the website itself, so I’d suggest clicking the “See full size image” link at the top.

Now you’re staring at the picture that you’d like to apply to your album in iTunes, right? To do that, secondary-click the picture and click “Copy Image.” The image is now stored in the magical clipboard. Go back to iTunes and select all the tracks in your album. You do that by clicking the first track in the album, hold down the shift key on your keyboard and then click the last track in the album. Now that the album is selected, secondary click one of the selected tracks. Choose the “Get Info” option.

At this point, it may ask you if you’re sure you want to edit the information for multiple items, it’s fine… you may even want to check the box that tells it not to bother you with that again. You’re looking at the “Multiple Item Information” window and should see the “Info” tab highlighted. Look to the bottom right of that window, you should find a square box labeled “Artwork.” Click in the box (make sure it has a blue highlight) and then press command+v on the keyboard to paste. This will paste the image we just copied onto your album. You should see a little preview of it in the “Artwork” field now. Click “Okay” and it will apply the image to your album.

If for some reason, you don’t like the image that it applies, just go back to Google, find another image, copy and paste it onto the album again. There’s no limit to how many times you can do that, so feel free to repeat the process until you find a picture that you’ll enjoy as the album artwork. Just repeat these procedures for each missing album cover; I’m sure your iTunes Library will look as great as mine in less time than you think.

I’ve never understood the philosophy behind many of Apple’s decisions… specifically, default settings within their applications. Take iTunes as an example: by default it’s not set to organize your Library at all. So what?

If you happen to be a user who downloads a lot of content, maybe from Apple, maybe from “other” places… it’s pretty likely that you have music strewn throughout your hard drive and you don’t even know it. With its default settings, iTunes keeps all songs in their original folders. It doesn’t actually move them to your Library folder like you thought. I’ve had many customers ask my why their music won’t play and why they have little exclamation points next to their songs in iTunes. The simple answer: they no longer have any music. How? They deleted the files out of the Downloads (or something similar) folder and didn’t realize it was going to cause problems.

Let’s fix that.

As you can see in the picture above, you can find the Organize Library feature by going to File -> Library -> Organize Library. Clicking that will pull up this window:

Check both boxes as you’re able and it’ll automatically organize your music into one location AND continue to do so in the future. Anything you play with iTunes with be copied into the proper folder. This will, however, leave you with duplicates: it doesn’t actually delete the original file, it just copies it and tells iTunes to reference the new file in the organized folder. You’re now on your way to better organization and less headaches in the future! So, why isn’t this the default setting for iTunes? We may never know.

RMMR will be writing more How-To’s in the future as we come across topics that we think you should know about. If you have a suggestion that you think would make a good article, just send us an email or tweet it to @rmmrdenver.