by Steve Sorbo | Feb 7, 2025 | Uncategorized
Cloud-based email services such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 dominate the market for organizational email for good reason. Dealing with the constant onslaught of spam and online attacks is hard, as those traumatized by running mail servers in the “good old days” can attest.
While email service providers excel at their primary functions of sending, receiving, and storing emails, they prioritize availability and uptime over backup and recovery. Depending solely on their built-in protection systems can leave organizations vulnerable to data loss. Although it’s exceedingly rare for email service providers to lose data due to system failures—all modern email systems are distributed and replicated in virtualized storage—they cannot safeguard against every risk. Here are some scenarios we’ve encountered where a separate email backup solution was useful:
- Recover from human error: This is the big one. People often accidentally delete important messages or clean out old messages too aggressively, inadvertently including critical conversations in a mass deletion. Backups ensure that these messages can be retrieved.
- Ease employee turnover: When employees leave, it’s essential to deactivate their email accounts for security reasons. However, information in their accounts may be vital for ongoing projects or legal purposes. Backups preserve this data for future access.
- Mitigate cyber threats: Phishing attacks are commonplace today. If an employee falls victim to one, their email account could be compromised and data lost. Worse still, the attacker could install malware—even ransomware, though that’s not a significant real-world concern for Apple-only installations—that could result in email data loss. While training employees to recognize and avoid phishing attacks is crucial, backups provide an essential safety net for anyone who makes a mistake.
- Facilitate data migration and archiving: Organizations often need to migrate email data from one system or user to another. While it’s rarely necessary or desirable to migrate everything—all the mail from the past year may be sufficient—it can be helpful to maintain archival access to historical communications.
In fact, both Google and Microsoft explicitly state that they store data for only a limited time and recommend employing a backup service. (The specifics may differ, but generally, you can retrieve a deleted email within 30 days, after which it may be recoverable for an additional 14 or 30 days.) Numerous companies provide email backup services, many of which are quite similar. The list below highlights some of the most common services, but we encourage you to reach out for recommendations based on your email service provider and organization size.
- CloudAlly offers unlimited data retention and extends its backup capabilities beyond email to encompass platforms such as Box, Dropbox, and Salesforce.
- CubeBackup focuses exclusively on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. It provides a cost-effective solution by allowing users to utilize their own local or remote storage.
- Backupify and Datto SaaS Protection are from the same company and offer the same backup capabilities, but they serve different market segments. Datto further enhances its branded services with a range of business continuity and data protection tools.
- Dropsuite provides unlimited storage and also supports QuickBooks Online backup. It features a flexible backup cadence, with email backups up to 12 times per day.
- MSP360 Managed Backup is a feature-rich solution that, while more complex and potentially more expensive than those from competitors, offers extensive customization and supports a wide range of storage providers.
- Spanning goes beyond Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 with Salesforce backups. It offers highly granular restores, enabling the recovery of individual emails. Its FLEXspend feature simplifies backup expenditures when transitioning between platforms.
- SpinBackup offers disaster recovery services at an affordable price point, and its developer, Spin.ai, provides a wide range of security solutions beyond backup, including data leak and ransomware protection.
- Synology Active Backup includes free add-ons for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 that back up cloud data to a Synology NAS. It’s an excellent solution for avoiding ongoing expenses.
As important as an email backup solution is for protecting against data loss, we urge you to proceed carefully when selecting one. If you end up with data that exists solely in a particular solution, legal retention requirements or the inability to export data in a non-proprietary format may lock you into paying for it indefinitely. Ideally, keep all data live so you can transition to a different solution to meet changing needs. Again, please contact us for help picking the most appropriate solution for your needs.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Rasi Bhadramani)
Social Media: Cloud-based email services like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 provide excellent uptime and availability. However, an independent email backup solution is essential to protect against accidental deletion, cyber threats, and other data loss concerns.
by Steve Sorbo | Feb 7, 2025 | Uncategorized
Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in October 2024 and expanded its extensive collection of AI-powered features with its December updates. The company’s January 2025 releases of macOS 15.3 Sequoia, iOS 18.3, and iPadOS 18.3 enhanced the feature set in several notable ways. Remember, Apple Intelligence features operate only on a Mac with Apple silicon, an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16, or an iPad with an A17 Pro or M-series chip.
Although Apple still considers Apple Intelligence to be in beta, the January operating system releases enabled it by default. From Apple’s perspective, this makes sense because so many features depend on Apple Intelligence, and the company aims to ensure a consistent user experience for everyone. Those features include:
- Photos: Clean Up, natural language searching, and improved Memory movie creation
- Text and Writing: Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration for any app
- Communication: Priority messages in Mail, Smart Reply and summaries in both Mail and Messages
- Notes and Phone: Audio transcription summaries
- Creative Tools: Genmoji and Image Playground for image generation, Image Wand for Apple Pencil sketches
- Focus: Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing and Reduce Interruptions Focus
- Notifications: Summaries for busy apps and conversations
- Siri: Enhanced capabilities, but primarily ChatGPT integration
- Camera: Visual Intelligence lookups (iPhone 16 only)
Apple Intelligence requires up to 7 GB of storage space (we see it occupying 5 GB in macOS 15.3 and 5.75 GB in iOS 18.3), so if your Mac, iPhone, or iPad is low on space, you may want to turn it off to free up room for photos, movies, and apps. Do that in the Apple Intelligence & Siri section of System Settings or Settings. However, you might not notice recovered space until your device decides to reclaim it. To check your space usage on a Mac, navigate to System Settings > General > Storage > macOS, and on an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > General > iPhone/iPad Storage > iOS/iPadOS.
Assuming you intend to keep it enabled, what can you expect from this third update to Apple Intelligence features?
Changes to Notification Summaries
Notification summaries have proven to be Apple Intelligence’s most controversial feature. They have generated blatantly incorrect news summaries and misidentified spouses, resulting in complaints from major publications and widespread mockery. In response, Apple has temporarily turned off notification summaries for all apps in the App Store’s News & Entertainment category.
Apple also italicized all the text in notification summaries to better distinguish them from standard notifications. Previously, the only indicator of a summarized notification was a tiny icon.
Finally, Apple made it easier to manage settings for notification summaries from the Lock Screen. On an iPhone, for instance, you can swipe right to reveal an Options button, tap it, and then tap Turn Off AppName Summaries. You can also report a concern with a summary—Apple solicits feedback as part of the Apple Intelligence beta.
Visual Intelligence Adds Scheduling and Plant and Animal Identification
Apple Intelligence enhances the new Camera Control button on iPhone 16 models, enabling it to respond based on what’s in the viewfinder. Initially, it could only ask ChatGPT about what it saw or conduct a Google image search. Now, when you press and hold the Camera Control, Visual Intelligence can also detect whether you’re pointing at a poster or flyer and suggest creating a calendar event. Additionally, if it identifies a plant or animal within the frame, it will recognize it and provide more information with a tap.
Genmoji Become Available on the Mac
iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 introduced the custom emoji Apple calls Genmoji, but macOS 15.2 did not include this feature. With macOS 15.3, the Mac has now caught up. The functionality remains the same—you describe what you want to see in a few words, and the Genmoji can be based on a picture of a person. The Genmoji you create are essentially stickers, but you can use them just like regular emojis.
To create one, open the emoji picker, type a few words of description, and click Create New Emoji. You can then experiment with different descriptions and scroll through Apple Intelligence’s variants before clicking Add to save your Genmoji and insert it wherever you’re typing.
We expect at least one more major release related to Apple Intelligence, likely in early March, coinciding with the .4 operating system updates. If Apple’s engineers meet their targets, these releases will enable Siri to access and leverage your personal information for more context-aware responses. Siri will also be able to perform actions within apps. Additionally, Apple has promised priority notifications to ensure that we are quickly alerted to the most critical messages while minimizing distractions from less important ones.
In the meantime, explore the Apple Intelligence features currently available and see if they enhance your Apple experience.
(Featured image by Apple)
Social Media: Apple’s third update to Apple Intelligence introduces changes to notification summaries (including disabling controversial news headline summaries), enhancements to Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 16, and Genmoji creation on the Mac.
by Steve Sorbo | Jan 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
Apple provides a handy ecosystem-wide feature that replaces a typed abbreviation—say “eml”—with text you specify, like your email address. (Seriously, copy that one so you don’t have to type your email address repeatedly.) These automatic text replacements sync via iCloud so you can use them on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Find them on the Mac in System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements and on the iPhone and iPad in Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. They’re great, but it can be mysterious when they stop working on the Mac. The culprit? A menu item being turned off. So, if text replacements aren’t working in a particular app, choose Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement to turn them back on.
(Featured image by iStock.com/tookitook)
Social Media: Apple’s built-in text replacement feature expands a short abbreviation you type into something longer, but a simple menu option can prevent it from working in a Mac app. Here’s how to fix it.
by Steve Sorbo | Jan 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
In macOS 15.2 Sequoia, Apple added the option to display the current weather conditions in the menu bar but hid the switch deep in the bowels of System Settings. To turn this option on, open System Settings > Control Center, scroll to the bottom, and in the Menu Bar Only section, for Weather, choose Show in Menu Bar. A new item with the current conditions at your location will appear in the menu bar; click it to see the forecast and access other locations in Apple’s Weather app.
(Featured image by iStock.com/trangiap)
Social Media: In macOS 15.2 Sequoia, you can display the current weather conditions in your Mac’s menu bar. Here’s how to enable that feature.
by Steve Sorbo | Jan 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
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.
by Steve Sorbo | Jan 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
An unheralded feature in iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 helps you manage the default apps on your iPhone and iPad. A default app is one that opens automatically for a particular function, like opening a Web link or inserting a saved password. Previously, the only way to change a default app was within the settings for that app, but now you can go to Settings > Apps > Default Apps to see and set all your options in one place. The Calling and Messaging options are new in 18.2, but Apple hasn’t yet given any third-party apps permission to appear in those lists. This new screen isn’t that big of a deal, but we wanted to use it as a reminder that alternatives to Mail and Safari might better fit your needs.
(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Thicha Satapitanon)
Social Media: Many people don’t realize they can choose alternatives to Apple’s Mail and Safari on the iPhone and iPad. A new Default Apps screen simplifies reviewing your options and changing your defaults.
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