GENIUS TIPS
EDITED BY HOWARD OAKLEY
EXPERT ADVICE
Our resident genius solves your Mac and iOS problems
Contact us
Email your queries and your questions to genius@macformat.com
The mother of all iCloud syncs
Thanks to a bug in iCloud Drive, T dating back to its debut in Yosemite, the Optimise Mac Storage option had a mind of its own. As a result, many of us were able to turn the option off, but still remove local copies of files that remained stored in iCloud.
Although it’s good to see that fixed in Sonoma, without warning, its effects can be unwanted and alarming. If you upgrade with storage optimisation turned off, all those files you had evicted to cloud storage can return to haunt you in an epic sync that can take days to complete.
If ever we needed to be warned of a change in behaviour resulting from fixing a bug, it was surely with Sonoma. If you haven’t upgraded yet, beware, if you’ve turned Optimise Mac Storage off, you could be in for the mother of all iCloud syncs when you do.
Protect a notebook from power glitches
Q How best to protect my MacBook Pro from mains power problems?
by EWA N LITTLEWOOD
A The conventional protection afforded by an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is of limited value with Mac notebooks, as they don’t support the USB connection provided from the UPS to signal to the computer that mains power has been lost, so the notebook can’t shut itself down in readiness. Desktop Macs provide for this in a UPS Options button System Settings > Energy Saver. Some more advanced UPS offer SNMP support, but that’s fiendishly difficult to set up even on a managed network.
Neither do notebooks need the fallback power from a UPS, as they have their own battery that will supply power for longer than the UPS could. What they do need, though, is good surge protection. Many mains power problems bring sudden spikes in supply voltage, that can at least damage a notebook’s charger, and at worst could even fry its logic board. A good surge protector is considerably cheaper, more portable, and well worth the cost.
You may still need to provide for powered peripherals like storage or an external display. As there’s no way for a UPS to warn those of power loss, the best you can do is ensure they’re also covered by good surge protection.