Here are three different ways to put Lion on a USB thumb drive. If you buy and install Lion from the App Store  it downloads all 3Gigabytes from the App Store, installs Lion, then deletes the installer!  So when you go to install it on another machine it needs another 3Gigabyte download! Here’s how to make a re-usable installer.

Option 1: Put a full bootable Lion installation on the USB Drive with a recovery partition.

What you need: an 8G thumb drive and OS X Lion from the App Store.

What you get: A USB stick you can boot off and repair your Lion installation from.

Download the Lion installer from Apple App Store. DO NOT INSTALL IT ONTO YOUR COMPUTER OR THE INSTALLER WILL DELETE ITSELF. MAKE A COPY OF THE INSTALLER.  If you have already installed it and it has deleted itself,  go back into the App store and click on ‘purchases’ and next to Lion it will say ‘Installed’. Now option-click on ‘purchases’ and ‘installed’ will change to ‘install’ so that you can re-download the installer.

Format your Thumbdrive using a GUID Partition Table, and ‘ Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, then you can run the Lion installer and install Lion onto the thumb drive.

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Option 2: Create a Lion Recovery Disk.

You’ll only need a 4G USB Drive for this option.

What you get: A USB stick you can repair your Lion installation from, but not run Lion from.

If your Macintosh has an existing Lion Recovery partition (this will be the case if Lion came pre-installed on your machine when you purchased your computer from Apple), you can use this method. It will not be a fill installer but it will use the internet to install Lion onto another computer. It involves downloading a program from apple called ‘Lion Recovery Disk Assistant’

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433

To test if you have a Lion recovery partition, Just hold down Command-R during startup and Lion will give you the option of going into recovery mode if the recovery partition is there.

Option 3: Make a Lion Installation USB Thumb drive like the one you buy from Apple.

What you get: A USB stick you can install Lion from – like the one that comes from Apple.

You’ll need an 8G USB thumbdrive.

1. Purchase and download the Lion Installer via the App store as in Option 1 above.

2. Right-click on the installer and select “Show Package Contents” and find  the file called  ”InstallESD.dmg” in the SharedSupport folder.

3. Use Disk Utility to ‘Restore’ this dmg file to a thumb drive to make a Lion Installation USB drive like you buy from the Apple Store. (the thumb drive must first be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID Partition Table.)

More info on this here.

The new OSX Lion comes as an upgrade from the Apple App Store – not on a DVD. The good news is that once you’ve paid for it once,  Apple allow you to install it on all the computers you own for free! After you purchase it from the App Store you  just have to go into the App Store on your other computers and Lion will be there – all paid for and ready to download again!

The Apple page on this is here.

Of course, you need to upgrade all your existing computers to Snow-Leopard first.

The main hitch is that it needs to download lots of files first.  See Paul’s comment below on how to avoid this.

There are two main ways to backup your Apple computer.

1. Use Time Machine to automatically backup. This is the Apple way – the easy way.

2. Manually backup with some other software such as Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner.

Apple’s way (Time Machine) is a lot simpler. The big disadvantage  is that the backup is not bootable.  So if your computer crashes you need to insert the original DVD and restore from at the old Time Machine backup. This can take hours.

The second method is more complicated, but the advantage is that your backup will be bootable. If you hold down Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup you can boot off your backup drive. This means that in an emergency you can plug in your backup and be running from it under a minute. You can’t do this with Time Machine.

This article describes the second method of manually backing up using Super Duper. When I wrote this article originally I used Super Duper, but I use CCC now. I like it better. No reason why.

I  have an external drive that I backup to monthly, so that if worst comes to worst and my entire computer crashes, I can be up and running again in minutes. (I actually have two, and I store one off-site with a friend, alternating each month)

To make a bootable backup you need to:

1. Buy an external hard drive
2. Format the hard drive
3. Download some backup software
4. Backup your Hard Drive
5. Run the backup software often

Now let me explain those steps in more detail.

1. Buy an external hard drive

You need an external hard drive at least as big as the hard drive on the computer you are intending to back up. Eg if you have an 200G hard drive on your imac, you should get at least an 200G for your backups. This way you will always fit your backup on the external drive.

2. Format the hard drive

Plug in your new hard drive. Run Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder). Select your new Hard Drive in the left pane, and in the Erase tab check it says ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ as below, type in the name you would like to call it (eg Backup) (here it says Untitled) and press Erase. It will now erase and format your external Hard Drive ready for use and call it Backup.

If you have a large external drive, and you want to backup more than one computer to it, then it is best to ‘partition’ it into two sections, one for each computer. To do this select the disk in the left pane and click on the partition tab. Select ’2 partitions’ and adjust to the size you want. Again, name them, make sure they are both Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and press Partition. In the example below I have partitioned my hard drive into two, one for backups (80G) and one for other stuff!

3. Download some backup software
Go to http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and download the latest version of SuperSooper. It’s free to be able to do a basic backup, or you can pay if you want extra features such as incremental backup (it’s faster, but the end result is the same). Copy Superdooper to your macintosh applications folder.

4. Backup your Hard Drive

Select your Macintosh HD in the left menu, select your new firewire drive in the right one, select ‘backup – all files’. Press copy now, go and have a cup of coffee while you wait a long time for it to copy all your files, perhaps up to an hour or so.

It’s good to select ‘Repair permissions before copying in the options tab, see below. This makes sure your OS X is functioning well before you back it up, otherwise there can be some problems.

5. Run the backup software often
The most important thing about backing up is to do it regularly, I do my main backup  once a month – but Time Machine is also doing it hourly. It’s a good idea to do a backup before you install any new system software in case something goes wrong in the installation so you can go back to what it was when you backed up.

How do I use the backup in an emergency?

• Plug in your external drive. Go to System Preferences, select ‘Startup Disk’, select your external Backup, press Restart.

OR

• Plug in your Hard disk and Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup. This will bypass the primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume such as the external one.

You are now running from your backup, and you just repeat the sections called Format the hard drive and Backup your Hard Drive but treat your Backup as the main one and the main one as your backup. In other words, run Disk Utility and erase your Macintosh HD, then run Superdooper and backup from your Backup to Macintosh HD. When the backup is finished, select Machintosh HD, and restart. You will now be running from your main computer again.

You might want to print these instructions out, so they are handy in an emergency. It’s no use having the instructions on how to boot in an emergency on your computer – you won’t be able to read them. Don’t laugh, I’ve done it!

Here’s an article on how to use time-machine.

Did you know that if you hold down SHIFT-COMMAND-4 you can take a picture of any part of your screen? Press SHIFT-COMMAND-4 and your cursor will turn into a cross-hair. (Try it right now!) Click and drag over anything and you can take a picture. It’s how most of the small pictures on this website are made.

Useful for all kinds of things, for example:

Grab a screenshot of a keynote graph:

Grab a heading from pages:

Grab a receipt from a webpage:

The top of your screen:

Or any information you want to keep:

I use Shift-Apple-4 a few times every day!
Also, Shift-Apple-3 takes a shot of the entire screen – I use this much less.

Switching to OS X from a PC is a big change. Here are a some of my random thoughts on the transition.

Mentally it’s better to think, “This is new, let’s learn it from scratch” rather than thinking of “changing” from PC to Mac.

There will be lots of times where you will think “How can I do this?”, but you can’t.

Try to resist the disappointment of lack of features, and enjoy the simplicity and integration OS X offers. Try to appreciate less is more.

Forget about Microsoft Office – don’t even install it on your Mac to begin with. Instead, buy iWork and try out Pages and Keynote.

Don’t be tempted to stay with Office because you are used to it. Don’t go back to it after a day of trying out iWork. Use Pages until you are comfortable with it. Use it until you have mastered its text editing, graphics, styles, exporting, text wrap, lists, shadow, charts. Use it till you appreciate the difference between Page Layout and Word Processing. (Think about how much time you’ve spent getting used to Microsoft Word – give Pages a chance) THEN, after you understand Pages, make the decision whether to go back to Microsoft Office or stay in Pages.

Despite the similarities between OSX and XP/ME etc, they are quite different.

I even took while a while to get used to iWork from Word and I am a Mac user.

Avoid the temptation that computer people have to put things in your own directories. OS X likes you to leave things where it puts them.

Eg if you put all your photos in iphoto, they will be available to iwork, idvd, imovie etc. If you decide to put your photos in your own spot, they won’t. OS X very integrated, but it likes you to put photos in iPhoto, music iTunes folder, addresses in address book, calendar in ical, movies into iMovie and so on. It’s best to just jump in boots and all and do it the OS X way.

Don’t be tempted to use Microsoft Office for email for 6 months because it’s easier – you lose the simplicity of the OS X integration if you do this.

Certainly don’t do things like partition a part of hard drive for all your data. The Mac way is to have everything on the boot drive – the way it comes from the shop. If you must, use an external drive for movie files.

Basically don’t fight against OSX, run with it.

Enjoy what it can do, try not to be frustrated by what it can’t do.

If there is a feature you want, email Apple about it and let them know.

Here are some more tips from Apple.

So your old laptop is running a bit slowly… it might be that the hard drive is too small and all your hard disk space is all used up. Here’s a few different ways to recover some extra Hard Drive space. Basically there are lots of files you can probably get rid of, and here’s now to find them.

You don’t even need to be totally free of space to do this, did you know that you should never fill your hard drive to more than approx 80% capacity or it will slow down performance?

1. Remove all the extra language files to gain a few hundred MB.
OS X comes with almost 50 languages, chances are you only speak one or two. Here’s how to delete the ones you don’t use.
1. Download Monolingual from here
2. Run it and it will remove all the language files you don’t need. It defaults to keeping English, gets rid of Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic etc. (Don’t use the other features of monolingual – just the language removal.)

This will be more useful on an older smaller hard drive, but if you have a drive bigger than 100G you probably won’t even notice an extra few hundred Megabytes.

2. Use Disk Inventory to see where your space is being taken.
You probably have lots of old files lying round you don’t use much, some of them might be very big. This program shows you what is taking the most space.
1. Download Disk Inventory X from here.
2. Run it, go have a cup of coffee – it can take a while.
3. Look at the results, they will be a picture like this:

You can mouse over the colors to see which files they are on the hard drive, and then manually delete the folders to create free space. I found lots of thinks I did not need with this program, like old movies hiding away, folders full of microsoft junk, etc. Don’t delete anything if you don’t know what it is though.

3. Clear out your Library/Application Support folder
Have a look in your Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support folder and there may be some old folders from applications you have deleted but no longer use. You can delete them.

4. Clear out your Printers
This is like the languages, but for printer drovers. OSX comes ready to work with hundreds of printers, chances are you only have one or two. Have a look in Macintosh HD/Library/Printers and delete any folders for printers you don’t need. For example the Epson library contains 1.4Gig of files – yet I don’t even have an Epson printer!

5. Manually delete files
The slow but hard way to make more space! But there is a trick to speed it up. To see how much space a folder takes, go to Menu ‘View/Show View options’ then select the box that says ‘calculate all sizes’. Then sort by folder size by clicking on the size heading in the window. You can now see which folders take the most space.

When you are finished deleting files empty the trash. This deletes them totally from your hard drive and frees up space. While they are in the trash they still take up space. Be careful, there’s no way to get them back after you have deleted the trash!

Movies take up the most space, if you delete them they will free up lots of space.

Check them out here

http://bit.ly/7NB2KP

• carbon copy cloner

See the entry on backups, this application allows you to make a bootable backup of your hard drive. Superdooper, a newer program, seems to be a more popular backup program and simpler to use, but it’s not free so I still use CCC.

• skype (voice over IP)

Skype allows you to speak to other skype users anywhere in the world for free over the internet. Simply download skype, create yourself a ‘skype name’, this is your unique skype name, and you are away. You don’t need to pay any money unless you want to make a call to a normal phone number. If you have an imac or a powerbook or ibook you can use the built in microphone and speaker, but for better results use a headset microphone which will stop any ‘echo’ you may experience. Your friends need to have their computer on when you search for them in skype for the first time, or skype will not find them.

• textwrangler

A great little text editor, like textedit, but many features such as search and replace on multiple files without opening them, automatic formatting for html, compare two different text files and show the differences, open and edit text files over ftp, if you’re not sure why you’d need those features, stick with textedit!

• mac the ripper

Allows you to capture a DVD from your DVD drive, then view it in quicktime. Good if you just want to watch one chapter of a DVD, or if you want to watch a DVD in the car without running your laptop battery flat – it uses much less power to watch a DVD from the hard drive than from the DVD drive.

• quicksilver

Fantastic application, hard to explain how to use it and what it does, but I use it probably at least 20 times a day. It allows you to do many things at the press of a key, like a shortcut, but without you having to remember what key does what, because it guesses what you want to do by what you type in, and it learns, very clever. It takes a bit of learning, but the time you save after learning it is well worth it. http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver

• combine pdf’s

As it says, allows you to combine multiple pdf documents into a single pdf documents. For example, combine a single page pdf from pages with a pdf printed from a screenshot with a pdf from illustrator all into one document of three pages.

• Cocoa booklet

Cocoa Booklet takes a multi page pdf file (eg 16 pages long), and makes it into a booklet by moving all the pages into a different order so that when you print it double sided and staple it into a booklet, all the pages are in the right order – like Microsoft publisher does on the PC. You can reduce the size too, ie make an a5 booklet from a4 pages.

• Audio hijack

Allows you to record any sound from your computer (skype conversation, itunes song, streaming audio, movie soundtrack etc) to an mp3 file. THIS IS NO LONGER FREE.

• LAME engine for itunes

See separate entry under music, this imports your itunes songs at a better quality than the itunes encoder.

• Online Bible

A free piece of bible software, easily the most simple to use, now available for OS-X as a beta release. Does searches on words in english, or greek/hebrew. A good cross reference system. Allows you to paste bible text into any application (eg Pages) with a hotkey.

• Audacity

A full-featured audio recorder. It can record audio with a level indicator, then process the audio (speed it up, slow it down, raise or lower the pitch, compress, normalise etc) and then export to mp3 or other formats. Stick with the simpler ‘soundstudio’ if you don’t need these features.

This one is quite an advanced tip.
If you right-click on a file you get a little menu, and if you select ‘open with’ you get a list of all the programs you can open a file with.
After a while of installing new versions of programs, this list can become quite long!
To reset it open up a Terminal window. (from Applications/Utilities) and paste the following line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

press return wait about 20 seconds, and your open with menu will be fixed.

I think this only works on 10.4 and it may reset some other things to, like what applications open certain files.