Anyone in L.A. good with Macs?

[wrangler7782]

my mac is slowing down and I want to back everything up onto an external hard drive, but before I do, I want to take all my porn off of it and put it on a separate external hard drive.

I've never done this before and I don't want to screw it up. I need someone to come over and show me how to do this, but I want someone who's not only gay friendly, but pretty judgement free......I've got a lot of porn.

Don't worry.....I'm NOT looking for a hook-up. Just want to clean up my Mac.

If anyone knows of any "gay friendly" Mac technicians in L.A., let me know!!

[GamerBear]

If you have Time Machine use it, basically backs up every single file on your hard drive and puts it on the external.

[Keeland]

If you don't want to use Time Machine to back up everything:

1. Get a Firewire external drive.

2. Plug it into the computer.

3. Using Disk Utility, reformat the external drive (likely the external drive is set up for Windows). The reformatting takes only seconds, depending on the size of the external drive.

4. Drag the files to the new drive.

To reformat the Firewire drive,

1. Plug it into the computer.

2. Start Disk Utility.

3. Click on the Firewire drive name.

3. Click the Erase tab at the top.

4. Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the drop-down.

5. Click Erase (on the extreme right at the bottom).

You could use a USB drive (copying files and the setup is the same as above), rather than a Firewire drive, but depending on which version of USB your computer supports, the file copying could take until the sun goes nova, and the external drive may not even work because of any USB version conflicts.

USB 1 would take forever before the files are copied.

USB 2 is faster but still slow. However, the USB 2 drive may not work if the computer supports only USB 1. This depends on whether the USB 2 drive is built to use both.

USB 3 is the fastest, but the USB 3 drive may not work if the computer supports only USB 1/USB 2. This depends on whether the USB 3 drive is built to use all three.

Even if you decide to use Time Machine, reformatting the external drive, whether USB or Firewire, before using it will ensure it's not using a Windows format. Just because the box says the drive is suitable for Macs doesn't mean the drive is set up for them.