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Enhance your image with Disk Utility!
It’s a new year folks, and it’s time to clean up those hard drives and develop some good habits.
In this article, we’re going to organize those millions of files and folders cluttering your poor little Mac and make it happy by using password protected disk images to archive and backup your junk!
Everyone from the newest Mac user to the grizzled veteran has run across a Macintosh Disk Image (DMG). The Disk Image, originated as a method of distributing multiple files in a secure and/or compressed format, has become the primary means of archiving installers for new software.
However, the DMG format has other uses, one of which we discuss in this article. By using the OS X included application ‘Disk Utility’ (/Applications/Utilities), you can easily accomplish the following tasks:
Put any number of files into a single file
Password protect that file
Compress it to save space
Some good reasons for doing this include:
Making system backups easier (instead of copying over 20,000 files, you only have one!)
Making your file system easier to navigate and manage
Securing private or sensitive documents
In this article, we’re going to do a little of each. We’re going to archive files collected into a folder into a password protected and compressed disk archive. By doing so, we can then have a nice, neat Documents folder that is easy to copy over to a DVD or backup drive, while still having instant access to our archived files.
Let’s begin! (As you progress through the tutorial, you can click any of the thumbnailed images to be shown a larger image.)
