enjoying the mac mini

[Travis Bickle]

Went out last week and finally got my first mac pc. I went for the base mac mini as it was the right price point for my first venture into the World of apple and also it seemed to have enough grunt to do what i need.

I'm used to using windoze so the whole OS-X thing is new on me. I'm sure in time i'll get the hang of it all but i do have a couple of questions.

I've been using it a week, messing around with installing an app or two, messing with iTunes and generally finding my feet. My questions are really regards time machine and iTunes folders.

I haven't set up time machine yet but now i've been messing around with it it seems like i should start again with a clean install and then do a time machine back up of the clean system. Is there any way of reverting the mac back to how it was when i got it out the box? Failing that, would i have caused any issues by installing and uninstalling a few progs? I seemed to have a problem with handbrake in that i tried to drag it down to the task bar (dock?) to keep it on there but i guess it doesn't work like that is OS - the next time i tried to use it via launchpad the handbrake icon had a big question mark on it and the only way to get it working was to install it again!

My second point is regards iTunes. I have a NAS setup at home whereby all media is located on the central server and i can then access it from both my TV's, mobile phone, laptop and now the mac. I have a music folder on there with all my albums and would like to use iTunes to access the file and also enable iTunes to add any tracks i may buy to that folder. Is that at all possible? It seems when i go into the iTunes setup it wants to copy every song over to the macs hdd as well as keep a copy on the server - i'm trying to keep the amount of stuff on the macs hdd to a minimum as i assume from my windoze experience that too much stuff on the hdd will slow the pc down but also i can't see the need to have two copies knocking around for the sake of it!

If anyone can give me idiot proof instructions i'd appreciate it - i was told OS-X is way more intuitive and easy to use but so far it seems to have a steep learning curve......maybe i'm too long in the way of Gates

 

[KScottMyers]

Hi Travis,

Hang in there - the Mac is far more intuitive than Windows.

As for your questions...
Uninstalling a few programs is fine and won't hurt the machine. If everything seems to be running OK, let it go. Without a clean Time Machine backup or earlier cloned HD image, there isn't a way to go back other than to reinstall. Suggestion - get TM up and running - its pretty seamless and works incredibly well.

Handbreak - I've seen this before and assume you just moved the handbreak app to the dock from the disk image and didn't first put handbreak in the Applications folder. When you restart the Mac the disk image is no longer mounted so the OS can't find the app... hence the question-mark. All apps should reside in the Applications folder - so move it there. Once you've done that, move it to the dock. This basically makes a shortcut to the app. Once again - I assume this is what you did and could be wrong.

iTunes - If you want to keep your music on the NAS and not have iTunes copy the files over to the Mac, make sure to turn off the option "Copy files to Media folder when adding to Library" in the iTunes advanced preferences. Now iTunes will just reference the files on the NAS.

Good luck.

 

[Travis Bickle]

cheers K,

I'll have a go this sometime this weekend, i did go into iTunes preferences and set the folder for music as the NAS but it didn't seem to show anything up! I'll have a proper play and see if i've messed things up somewhere!

 

[KScottMyers]

cheers K,

I'll have a go this sometime this weekend, i did go into iTunes preferences and set the folder for music as the NAS but it didn't seem to show anything up! I'll have a proper play and see if i've messed things up somewhere!

You have to drag the music files over to iTunes so they index.

 

[satcomer]

Read the Apple document iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder.

 

[KScottMyers]

Read the Apple document iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder.

Although this is a solution - you don't have to move the library to reference files on a network share. Just to be clear - If you want to keep your music on the NAS and not have iTunes copy the files over to the Mac, just turn off the option "Copy files to Media folder when adding to Library" in the iTunes advanced preferences. iTunes will now just reference the files on the NAS.

 

[Travis Bickle]

thanks again.

If at anytime i want to do a fresh reinstall of lion, what's the procedure?

 

[KScottMyers]

thanks again.

If at anytime i want to do a fresh reinstall of lion, what's the procedure?

You'll want to hold down Command-R to boot into the recover partition and then walk through the install process.

I think if you spend some time on this forum all of your answers will be found. Have fun.

 

[Travis Bickle]

cheers kscott, i was being plain lazy on that last one

 

[Wicked1]

Here is another question to throw out there?

My wife has been using a 2009 Mini and now I am getting her a Macbook refurb, so how does one restore the contents of the TM backups to a whole new machine.

Also the other question is how to you get all the photos out of iPhoto and on to the new MB?

I know I can do this manually but will TM backup from one system and restore to another completely different system?

 

[Gav2k]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Here is another question to throw out there?

My wife has been using a 2009 Mini and now I am getting her a Macbook refurb, so how does one restore the contents of the TM backups to a whole new machine.

Also the other question is how to you get all the photos out of iPhoto and on to the new MB?

I know I can do this manually but will TM backup from one system and restore to another completely different system?

Make sure both macs are either on the same network or the time machine drive if external is connected to the new machine. Power up and use the migration assistant. It'll ask where to migrate from. You can either select time machine backup or you can select an account on your other mac.