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Never Save Your Work in These Locations

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In every job that involves interaction with the public, amusing “Can you believe…” stories about customers abound. They’re often triggered by seemingly reasonable behaviors that experts recognize as problematic. A well-known example from the early days of personal computing is a college student who kept track of his floppy disk by attaching it to his fridge with a magnet, not realizing that magnetic fields could disrupt the disk’s magnetic patterns and corrupt files. The advice from tech support? “Don’t do that.”

No one is sticking floppies to their fridge anymore, but we still occasionally see the modern equivalent: saving data or documents in places that are likely to disappear. Just as you shouldn’t write the only copy of essential information on an easily erased whiteboard, you shouldn’t store important data in any of these locations:

  • Unsaved documents: While autosave is becoming more common, it isn’t universal and often doesn’t activate until a document has been saved for the first time. When you create a new document, always save it right away, before you do anything else. Otherwise, you risk losing all your work if the app crashes, the Mac kernel panics, or the power goes out.
  • Trash: We know, we know! Who would put something in the Trash that they want to keep? But it happens. Don’t do that! On the other hand, there’s also no reason to empty your Trash regularly unless you’re low on space. A good compromise is to choose Finder > Settings > Advanced and select “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days.” This way, you’ll always have a 30-day grace period to recover mistakenly deleted items.
  • Clipboard: Most people know that the clipboard serves as a temporary holding place, overwritten with each new Copy or Cut. However, if you’re unaware of this, you might write something lengthy, use Cut to place it on the clipboard with the intention of pasting it elsewhere, and then forget to do so right away, resulting in data loss on the next use of Copy or Cut. Always paste anything you cut immediately. Many utilities (such as Copy ‘Em, Keyboard Maestro, LaunchBar, Pastebot, and Raycast) provide clipboard history so you don’t lose clipboard data immediately, but you still shouldn’t rely on it persisting indefinitely.
  • Email Drafts mailbox: There’s nothing wrong with starting an email and coming back to it later to finish—that’s the point of the Drafts mailbox. It’s also a sensible way to begin a message on one device and complete it on another. However, avoid storing anything in Drafts for an extended period, and be aware that items there may disappear without warning. (And never, ever store anything in your email Trash mailbox—it will be deleted eventually.)
  • Temporary folders: Thanks to its Unix roots, macOS includes several temporary folders, one located at /tmp and others specific to each user. These folders are cleared regularly, such as when the Mac is restarted, left idle for a long time, or when drive space is low. Storing important data in a temporary folder is a digital version of Russian roulette.
  • Downloads folder: Although the Downloads folder isn’t inherently volatile, it’s unwise to store anything important there. You might forget about that document while tidying up and accidentally delete it, or you might use a cleanup tool in the future that does it for you.
  • USB flash drives: There is nothing wrong with putting files on a USB flash drive. However, avoid storing the only copy of an important file on one, as it is too easy for the drive to be lost or damaged.
  • Public computers, virtual machines, and sandboxed environments: This scenario is unlikely but not impossible. Imagine you’re working on a public computer in a lab and save a file on the desktop. When that computer reboots, it will likely delete all data to return to a fresh state for the next user. The same could apply to a virtual machine used for testing or a sandboxed environment that you log in to remotely.

There are also a few locations that generally aren’t problematic but deserve extra attention due to the higher likelihood of losing data:

  • Third-party app folders in ~/Library: Some apps store their data in folders they maintain within your user account’s Library folder. While this is acceptable for data managed by those apps, we advise against putting anything else in these folders since it’s impossible to know how the app might deal with data it doesn’t recognize during a cleanup or major update.
  • Desktop: It’s fine to work on documents stored on the desktop, but we recommend filing them away carefully when you’re finished. If you frequently move files in and out of your desktop, it’s all too easy to delete something important accidentally. Additionally, if you have iCloud Drive’s Desktop & Documents folder syncing enabled, you might unintentionally delete files from another Mac due to being in a different context.
  • Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive: Cloud storage services are entirely acceptable locations for important data, but they all offer options that store files only online, downloading them only when necessary. These options may prevent online-only files from being accessible when you’re offline or from being backed up locally. Worse, if you share cloud storage with others for collaboration, they could accidentally delete your data. Be sure to enable any available version history options and ensure everything is backed up locally.
  • External drives or network storage: Many individuals and organizations store essential files and data on external drives and network storage. This approach is perfectly valid, provided that these locations are backed up. When designing your backup system, remember to include your external drives, network servers, and NAS devices. Lastly, if an external drive is encrypted, ensure that you have a backup of both its data and the decryption key.

If you want to avoid all these issues, save your files in your Documents folder and make sure you have a solid backup strategy.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/shutjane)

Social Media: We won’t name names, but we’ve seen too many people saving important data in locations that are likely or even guaranteed to disappear. Here’s a list of places to avoid and another of spots that warrant caution.

How to Convince Microsoft Office Apps to Save Files on Your Mac

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By default, Microsoft Office apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—try to save files on Microsoft OneDrive as a way of promoting the company’s cloud storage. If that’s undesirable, you can easily keep your files locally on your Mac or in a different cloud storage location. In the Save dialog, click the On My Mac button to switch to a standard Save dialog showing all your other storage options. There’s no way to set On My Mac as the default location, but the Save dialog automatically remembers your last saved location. That should be sufficient most of the time, although it’s not unheard of for an Office update to flip the Save dialog back to OneDrive.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/pzAxe)

Social Media: Microsoft Office apps save documents in the cloud-based OneDrive by default, but you can easily switch to saving files elsewhere. The apps generally remember your change but may forget after an update.

Control Window Tiling in macOS 15 Sequoia

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One of macOS 15 Sequoia’s most noticeable additions is a new form of window tiling. Drag a window to the menu bar to expand it to fill the screen, to the left or right edge to resize it to half the screen, or to a corner to resize it to that quarter of the screen. As you drag, a white outline shows what will happen when you drop the window. Unfortunately, accidentally invoking window tiling can be surprising and disruptive. The easiest way to ensure that dragging windows tiles them only when you want is to open System Settings > Desktop & Dock, scroll down to the Windows section, and turn off “Drag windows to screen edges to tile” and “Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen.” The important setting to leave turned on is “Hold Option key while dragging windows to tile” because from now on, your windows will tile only when you Option-drag them.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Jakob Berg)

Social Media: Those who are disconcerted by dragged windows suddenly resizing accidentally in macOS 15 Sequoia, take note: you can tweak settings to make Sequoia’s new window tiling feature activate only when you want.

Energy Saver Can Shut Down Your UPS-Equipped Mac in a Power Outage

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An uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, provides essential protection from power surges, spikes, brownouts, and outages. But if you’re not at your Mac when the power goes out, the UPS may run out of battery before you (or the power) return. Happily, if you connect your Mac to your UPS with a USB cable, macOS can detect the outage and shut your Mac down safely, regardless of what else is happening. Make sure open documents are saved whenever you step away from your Mac, or you could lose changes. In System Settings > Energy Saver > UPS Options, you can trigger the shutdown in three ways: after using the UPS battery for a specified amount of time, when the time remaining on the UPS battery hits a specific number, or when the UPS battery level drops below a particular percentage. There’s no harm in setting all three. Remember that it can take a minute or two for your Mac to shut down, so err on the short side for safety’s sake. Apple supports most UPS models from major manufacturers such as APC, CyberPower, and Tripp Lite.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Social Media: If you connect your Mac to your UPS with a USB cable, you can use Energy Saver to shut your Mac down automatically in the event of a power failure… before the UPS battery runs out.

Missed an Alert? Check Notification Center

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iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all let you specify whether any given app should show no notifications, temporary banners, or persistent alerts: look in Settings > Notifications and System Settings > Notifications. Temporary banners appear briefly and then automatically disappear, which is appropriate for notifications requiring no acknowledgment. But what if you see a temporary banner only as it’s disappearing and can’t read it in time? You can find a historical list of notifications in Notification Center. To open it from the Lock Screen on an iPhone or iPad, swipe up from the middle of the screen. From any other screen, swipe down from the center of the top of the screen. On the Mac, click the date and time in the upper right corner. If your Mac has a trackpad, you can also swipe with two fingers from the right edge.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Shutthiphong Chandaeng)

Social Media: If a temporary banner disappears from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac before you have a chance to read it, you can find it in Notification Center.

Protect Domains That Don’t Send Email from Email Spoofing

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We recently wrote an article for those who manage their own Internet domain names about using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to prevent your domains from being used in phishing attacks and enhance the deliverability of legitimate email. But what about other domains you own but don’t use for email? To make phishing attacks more believable, spammers sometimes forge email so it appears to come from parked domains that aren’t protected. You can use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to ensure that forged email that seems to come from your unused domains isn’t accepted. The details are too specific to go into here, but Cloudflare has an excellent article outlining what you need to do.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Igor Kutyaev)

Social Media: If you have parked domains that never send email, it’s important to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so scammers can’t forge legitimate-looking email from those domains.

Having Trouble with a Public Wi-Fi Network’s Captive Portal Login Page?

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When you connect to a public Wi-Fi network at an airport, hotel, coffee shop, or school, you may need to interact with a captive portal login page to be granted access to the network. It might require you to enter login credentials, ask for your name, or make you agree to terms of service. But what if that login page doesn’t appear, or something kicks you off the network and you can’t reconnect? In Safari, navigate to captive.apple.com, which should force the captive portal to display its login page again. If that doesn’t work, remove any custom DNS servers and restart. On the Mac, find custom DNS servers in System Settings > Network > Wi-Fi > Details > DNS. On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Wi-Fi > Network Name > Configure DNS and choose Automatic.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/CreativaImages)

Social Media: When you connect to a public Wi-Fi network, you often must authenticate or agree to terms on a captive portal login page. Here’s the solution if that page doesn’t appear.

Find Some Ham Amidst Your Email Spam

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Spam filters work pretty well—99% of the messages in your spam mailbox are probably spam. But it’s frustrating to miss an important message that was caught by an overeager spam filter. Here’s an easy way to find many good messages, also known as “ham,” amidst all the spam. Think of keywords that might appear in legitimate email to you: the name of your city, major employers in your area, nearby colleges, companies whose products you use, their products, and so on. Then search for those terms inside your spam mailbox, either one at a time or, if your email app supports it, as a single search with OR statements for each keyword, like this Gmail search (use your actual town name and so forth): in:spam townName OR employerName OR clubName OR companyName. Of course, your keywords will appear in some spam messages, but if the searches reveal ham messages you would otherwise have missed, they’re worthwhile. Be extra cautious around any message that wants you to click a link, log in, or provide private information. The fact that your spam filter caught a message is a red flag.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Igor Kutyaev)

Social Media: Rather than frequently skimming your entire spam mailbox for incorrectly captured messages, try searching for specific keywords that are likely to appear in legitimate email.

How to Avoid Head-Tracked Spatial Audio for FaceTime Audio Calls

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If you listen to a FaceTime Audio call using AirPods and hear the other person’s voice moving annoyingly from side to side as you turn your head, the problem is likely head-tracked spatial audio. In general, spatial audio attempts to make sounds seem to come from all around you, and its dynamic head-tracking option adjusts the audio for each ear to simulate how the sound would change as your head moves. Dynamic head tracking may be desirable for music or movies, but with a FaceTime Audio call, having the other person flip back and forth between your ears can be highly disconcerting. To stop this behavior on an iPhone or iPad, open Control Center, touch and hold the volume control, and tap either Off or Fixed instead of Head Tracked. Spatial audio isn’t an option on Mac FaceTime calls.

(Featured image by iStock.com/1550539)

Social Media: If you’ve ever experienced a weird situation where sound on a FaceTime Audio call moves back and forth between your AirPods, it’s because of spatial audio’s dynamic head tracking. Learn how to turn it off.

Annoyed by Inline Predictive Text Suggestions? Here’s How to Turn Them Off

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In a slight nod to the hype surrounding generative AI, Apple added inline text prediction capabilities to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. They can be helpful, particularly on the iPhone and iPad, where it’s often much easier to tap the Space bar than to finish typing a word or sentence. But that’s less true on the Mac, where a fast typist can be slowed down or derailed by the suggestions, and some people dislike having an AI finish their thoughts. The feature is easily turned off. On the iPhone and iPad running at least iOS/iPadOS 17.2, go to Settings > General > Keyboard and switch off Show Predictions Inline. (Leave Predictive Text on to continue to get suggestions above the keyboard.) On the Mac running macOS 14.2 Sonoma or later, open System Settings > Keyboard, click Edit under the Text Input header, turn off “Show inline predictive text,” and click Done.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Armastas)

Social Media: If you’re not a fan of the new inline text predictions on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you can easily turn them off and get back to typing only the words you want to appear.