Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, 2nd Edition was published a few months before the release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and a number of people have asked whether the book is still up to date, or whether anything about Mavericks changes the backup story. The short answer is: The book is still fine. You can follow all the instructions in the book, even if you’re running Mavericks.
However, a few facts have changed that you may want to be aware of:
- Mavericks and Time Machine: Although Time Machine in Mavericks functions almost identically to the way it did previously, the menu bar icon no longer spins when a backup is in progress; it only displays a tiny triangle below the point of the circular arrow—the subtlest indication that a backup is occurring. In addition, Time Machine no longer displays Time Capsule disks as mounted drives in the Finder during regular backups.
- AirPort Disks: I say on pages 41, 43, and 73 that you can’t use Time Machine to back up your Mac to an AirPort Disk—that is, an external USB disk connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station. But now you can, if, and only if, you have one of the new, tall, 802.11ac models of the AirPort Extreme released in June 2013 (shortly after the book was published). The older, flatter models still don’t support Time Machine. (However, all Time Capsule models, including the old flat ones and the new tall ones, do support Time Machine backups to an external USB disk.) You can read more about this in Adam Engst’s TidBITS article Use Time Machine with the 802.11ac AirPort Extreme Base Station.
- James Pond: In several places in the book, I mention James Pond’s fabulous Apple OS X and Time Machine Tips site. The site is still there and remains a valuable resource, but James Pond died in September 2013 at the age of 70. I was very sorry to hear of this.
- Backupify: This backup service, which I mention on p. 172, has changed its focus to be strictly business-oriented, and although it can still back up Gmail, it now supports only Google Apps accounts. The pricing structure has changed, as well.
I do have a (short) list of other topics I’d like to cover in more detail or clarify in some way in a future version of the book, but they aren’t specific to Mavericks and also not particularly urgent. Very tentatively, I imagine I might update the book to version 2.1 after the next version of OS X (10.10?) is released, presumably late in 2014—but we’ll have to see what changes Apple has in store for us and when.