The tools in macOS can assist with storage repair, file recovery, screen sharing, and much more. In this video, you’ll learn about the Terminal app, how to recover a file using Time Machine, and more.
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MacOS includes a backup utility that you can use to easily restore files if you need to recover any information. This is Time Machine, and it’s designed to back up your files automatically. And when you choose to restore this information, it simply brings up a view of the finder in macOS, which should be very familiar to someone who’s using this operating system.
There’s dates along the right side that you can use to go back in time, find exactly the right date you’d like to restore from, you click one button, and you can restore that particular file. You would normally have a backup drive that was directly connected to your computer or across the network, but if you’re on a laptop and you’re away from that backup drive, the operating system will save snapshots of that information. And when you connect back to your network, Time Machine will update the backup with the snapshot information.
Here’s the Time Machine interface that shows me the finder user interface in the middle of the screen that shows all of the files in the current folder. On the right side of the screen are the dates that this information was backed up. So you can view all of the updates from today, the updates from yesterday, and you can even go back months in time, depending on how much space is available on your backup device. If I choose any of these previous dates and double click on that date, Time Machine will rewind back to that particular date and time and give me options for restoration for that particular date.
If you’re a system administrator for a Windows operating system, you’re probably very familiar with using images to be able to backup and restore information. There’s also disk image functionality built into macOS. And if you use Disk Utility, you’ll have a way to build disk images and be able to restore information from those images. The apple disk images are called dmg files. These disk image files can be easily created and mounted on any macOS system.
It appears as if it’s a normal file system, but it’s really an image file that you’re working with. You can also use the restore feature within Disk Utility to be able to restore all of the information from an image. This makes it very easy to backup a large section of a drive, and then be able to quickly restore that at any time.
The Disk Utility application is not only used to manage your images, but it can also be used to manage the other disks in your system as well. There are a number of functions built into Disk Utility. If you’re running into a problem with your file system and you’d like to verify the file system or repair any issues, you can use the first aid option within Disk Utility. If you’re adding a new drive or you want to modify a partition, you can make those changes to the partition within Disk Utility, and then use the erase function to format that partition.
And as we mentioned earlier, we can create and restore images from Disk Utility. We can also use Disk Utility to expand or remove information from a particular image.
Just as we have a command line in Windows, we also have a command line in macOS. We can access this command line from the terminal utility. This provides us with a single view of the command line so that we can make changes to the operating system without going through the graphical user interface. If you’re a system administrator, you’ll use this command line to modify applications in the operating system, to be able to run scripts, and to be able to manage the files that are on your system.
In Windows, you can use remote desktop to be able to view the screen of a remote computer. In macOS, this is integrated into the operating system with the screen sharing function. This is integrated into the macOS finder. So you can list out all of the different computers on your network, and then right mouse click and choose to share their screen. You can also use third party utilities that are compatible with VNC, which is the virtual network computing, which is the screen sharing technology built into macOS.
In any operating system, you’ll find applications that will occasionally simply stop working, and, in those situations, you need some way to administratively halt that particular application from executing. You can do this in macOS by using the force quit option. This is a force quit view that lists out all of the applications that are currently running, and you can simply select that application and press force quit.
The force quit option is normally found in the Apple menu in the upper left hand corner of the screen, but you can also bring up this window by pressing command option escape. You can also force quit an individual application by holding down the option key and right clicking on the application on your dock. This will bring up an enhanced set of options for this particular application, and, in this list, will include force quit. If you choose that option, the application will then close.