It may have happened to you that over time you have run out of space on your Time Machine volume, but did not want to lost the older backups it contained.  Or you’ve received one of the Time Machine errors that it can no longer back up to your Time Machine volume and all the fixes focus on you erasing the volume and starting over, and this option doesn’t fill you with joy.  With full credit to the staff at MacWorld, here’s a great tip.

Connect your older Time Machine volume to your Mac by whichever connectivity suits the volume and your Mac.  Then without disconnecting your current Time Machine, Option Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.  If the icon isn’t there, you can make it visible in the Time Machine pane in System Preferences.  When you option click, you’ll get the option you see in the graphic above, to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.  Select it and point to the older volume.  Now you’ll be able to go even further back in time to retrieve that critical file.

There are a lot of these option click options in Snow Leopard for menu bar icons, this one happens to be really useful.

I recently discovered to my chagrin that Apple Mail on my MacBook Air would no longer start. This was part of a much larger set of problems that this machine was starting to demonstrate including slowdowns, application lockups and other issues.

In doing some research on how to fix this problem, I discovered a series of threads I wanted to share with you. Many Mail issues can be resolved through rebuilding the index for Mail. Here’s how.

1. Open ~/Library/Mail where the ~ represents your user home folder
2. Drag the file called Envelope Index to your desktop
3. Make sure this file no longer shows in the Mail folder
4. Relaunch Mail
5. Accept the prompt to import messages
6. Review any messages telling you that your machine is out of sync with MobileMe and make the decision that best suits your data.
7. You’re done

If this doesn’t work for you completely, you’ve got a bigger problem, but it does solve a number of issues.

Like a lot of you, I’ve added a variety of Western Digital external hard disks to my setup, from Worldbooks to MyBooks to the Passports. My initial experiences weren’t great but have gotten better over time.

I recently discovered that the folks at WD have made updates to their Mac software to increase throughput through USB and Firewire and updated the firmware on several of the drives. Go to www.wdc.com and click the support link. Choose downloads and pick your drive from the listings. Pictures are provided since the name isn’t anywhere on the drive I can find.

Performance with the new drivers is better and drives that would “vanish” in the past are now there consistently. If you have WD drives, update them, you’ll be happy.