In Supporting your family, Macworld’s Chris Breen offers excellent tips for anyone seeking help with a computer. If you’re the tech support for family (and we’re about to surprise Mom with an iMac; she won’t see this because her existing ancient hand-me-down PC is unusably slow), or you’re just a user with problems of your own, the article offers excellent guides for first steps as well as how to deal with support techs. A terrific takeaway suggestion: take a photo of the problem as it occurs on-screen and print it out and take it with you. Worth a thousand words!

One of our professors met the author of this article about backing up your Mac while in California at a conference. You do have good backups, right?

Losing data is a drag. Many of us store digital photos, original documents, calendaring and contact information, architectural drawings, spreadsheets, video and music on our computers. This data can be irreplaceable if your computer is lost or stolen, or if your hard drive fails.

With good timing, The Unofficial Apple Weblog adds this article on External HDs to their Mac 101 series. External drives are inexpensive (I checked prices at dealnews’s storage pages, they listed tereabyte drives for less than $180 – oof!), it’s really important to backup, and it’s getting so easy to do with Time Machine or other solutions.

Do it now!

Macworld tells us the ins and outs for setting up Time Machine. If you you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, this is more than worthwhile; it could very well save your bacon, by which I mean all your important data… which these days is all your data. Right?

MyAppleMenu linked to this post, a link-rich discussion of backup strategies for the Mac. Before Leopard, I’d been using Carbon Copy Cloner, but Apple incorporated its capabilities into Leopard’s Disk Utility, so its developer, Mike Bombich—who works for Apple—hasn’t released a version for it.

I don’t have time to go through it now, but Shawn Blanc’s SuperDuper, Time Machine and Bulletproof Backups looks like yet another reason to be grateful for the terrific community that surrounds the Mac.

A smart person at ComputerWorld’s Shark Bait contributed a solid way to come up with a secure password that’s easy to remember. “Secure” and “memorable” don’t have to be contradictory terms!

Think of a song.

Now think of either the title or a line in the song that is at least 6 words long.

Write that down

If you take the time to walk a user through this once, give ‘em a cheat sheet to remember, they will always be able to create a password that is fairly secure and easy for them to remember.

An engaging and important series about managing security on your Mac. Very timely, with Leopard arriving in 10 days.

The special has five separate pieces covering how to make your Mac more secure. Read them, know them love them; be aware of the threats to your computer and be proactive in preventing them.

Could you be the biggest threat to your Mac’s safety?

Take our Mac security pledge.

I will keep my Mac safe from other users
I know that anyone can access my computer whenever I’m not looking, so I’ll try to prevent others from getting at my private data.

I will use good passwords
I will make life difficult for anyone trying to break into my Mac or my online accounts by choosing excellent passwords and protecting them properly.

I will be careful when using a wireless network
Wireless networks are easily hacked, and public networks are the least secure. I won’t take any chances; I’ll always encrypt my wireless connection.

I will behave cautiously online
I can’t always know when I can trust a Web site to guard my private data. So I will take steps to keep personal information personal.

I will be smarter about how I handle e-mail
Safer e-mailing requires not just spam filtering but greater care in sending, reading, and responding to messages.

Walking the walk
It’s one thing to recommend safe computing habits. It’s entirely another to implement those recommendations. We asked Senior Editor Rob Griffiths to spend a couple of days implementing some of the suggestions in our Lock It Up series.

I just met with Dr. Kamphaus, the new dean of our college, to help him prep for a presentation tomorrow. He uses a black Apple MacBook. I said, “Oh, you have a MacBook.” He said, “I don’t like viruses.”