Tips on Working with Images in WordPress

I have been blogging off and on for quite a few years.  I was first encouraged to blog by a buddy of mine named Steve Mays. He worked for Learfield communication and was responsible for assisting clients to create blogs of their own mostly related to sports teams.  Steve got me involved in a product called TypePad and over the years I moved on and off of other blogging platforms that are mirror footnotes in blog history. Finally, Steve recommended that I move to WordPress and that seems to have been one of the best recommendations I’ve had in my blogging history. 

I was having coffee with Steve this week and talking about an individual I was working with to begin a new blog. After our talk, Steve wrote up some tips for me on about utilizing the WordPress Media Library.   As I read through the tips I knew I wanted to post them on my blog for others to be able to get the benefit of. Steve graciously allowed me to do so.

WordPress Media Library Tips

The WordPress Media Library is powerful but it takes some thought and discipline to get the most out of it. And the time to start is when you launch the blog. Or before. The following are some things I’ve done right — and wrong — with images (and video) on my blog.

Use a good file naming convention. IMG_0850.jpg is not a good file name. Before uploading, take the time to rename the file and there’s no compelling reason to keep the file name short. In the example below I named the file “exhaust pipe 2apr2019-A” but could have just as easily named it “Land Rover original exhaust pipe brazing April 2, 2019 – A”. The more descriptive the better. And be consistent. Use the same format on all images.

WordPress Media Library

The first field in the WordPress form below is “Alternative Text.” This is what one would see when they hovered their cursor over the image. Especially useful for those with vision problems. The link in the form has more on “alt text.”

Title. By default WordPress uses the file name but you can edit this to title the image as you choose. As far as I know this doesn’t appear anywhere on your blog post.

Caption. I tend not to use captions but this will depend a lot on how you display images in your post. I prefer to describe the image within the body of the post. I just don’t like the way way WP handles captions.

Description. I discovered this useful field relatively recently. I wish I had made better use of it from the first day I moved to WP. Again, as far I have been able to determine, the contents of this field does not appear with the image in the post. I started using this field when I discovered the text is searchable. So if you have 1,000 images in your library and would like to search for all with the phrase “Lake of the Ozarks” in the Description field, make sure you include that phrase. There’s no real tagging feature for images but you can use this field for that. For example, you might include the word *gear* for any photo of equipment; *John and Jane Doe* for each photo of John and Jane; *fall foliage* for… you get the idea.

The trick is to spend some time thinking about this at the very beginning because it’s a pain to go back and do this after you have hundreds of photos and videos. And you’ll be surprised how fast your media library grows. And how often you want to reuse an image you you posted months or years earlier.

Bottom Line: Don’t Update Flash Player

OK folks, it’s worth saying again, there are no dancing kitties or laughing dogs worth the risk of accepting an update to flash player. This specific post is going to cover updating your Mac flash player, but the same goes for flash player on the PC.  The only way to ensure that you don’t get caught from a scam flash player installer is to not update flash player.  

Analysts say that the the number one way that computers, particularly Macs get infected with malware is through flash player updates.  It usually happens like this. 

You’re surfing the web, perhaps looking for entertainment or searching for a product you want to purchase at a great price. All of a sudden you get a prompt that pops up telling you that your flash player is outdated and needs to be updated. This prompt looks completely legitimate. It looks just like the prompts from Adobe that you seen in the past.  But what you don’t realize is that it is truly a phishing scam it’s designed to look like a standard update.  If you click update, guess what? You’ve just infected your Mac with malware. Very likely you won’t even notice for a while because these type of infections typically download what’s called a “stub“.  This small program will run in the background and download other malware on to your machine. Perhaps it will change your homepage in your browser, maybe it’ll change your search engine to a search engine that looks just like Google but isn’t.  Maybe you’ll begin seeing pop-ups every once in a while. These are all signs that one click has infected your computer. 

This process is very similar on a PC. But typically, malware installed on a PC is much more advanced and can often search your computer for personal data and send it off to some website in the sky.

The answer is simple. Eliminate flash from your life. Resist the idea of installing, or updating flash on your machine. It just isn’t worth it. The risk of being infected from some of these flash player update prompts is much greater than any value you get from a little flash video.  You see the truth is, developer is no longer develop legitimate applications in flash. It’s old technology, it’s far from secure, and there are much better tools to develop anything current. 

But, there are millions of existing flash developed apps still out there on the web. Many of these are games that were developed 15 years ago when it was the only technology that would allow you to move things around on the screen easily. Even more might be ad platforms that allow people to use a JPEG and a link to purchase placements on legitimate websites. Whatever they are, the ability for you being able to see these is nowhere near worth the risk of problems installing flash player updates can cause.  

If you ever see prompts similar to this, ignore them. Move on.  There is plenty of content on the web for you to be able to see that doesn’t require flash player.

Often times, I finish a discussion such as this by describing the correct way to update your flash player. But I’ve recently seen so many of these infections on peoples Macs That I just can no longer recommend using flash at all. I’m sure you can search the web and find the correct way to do flash updates but my recommendation to you is to forget about flash, and forget about those puppies and kitties that often times lure us into clicking on things that hurt us.

Mac Recommendations for 2019

Often times people ask me which Mac would I recommend for them to purchase.  Everyone has different needs and wants so it is hard to create a written post that defines which machine would be the best to purchase.  Apple is changing machine configurations a few times a year so anything I would write here would likely be superseded within a few months anyway.  So what can I put in writing that would be universal to anyone looking for a new Mac?

In the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to setup a few new machines for people.  I have setup a new MacBook Air and a couple of iMacs.  From these experiences, here is the recommendation I will be sticking with for 2019.

Never ever purchase a Mac with a Spinning Drive Again

In 2019, I vow to make this single recommendation to anyone that asks me “Which Mac should I Purchase?”.  By a Mac with a Solid State Disk Drive (SSD)!  

Some of you might ask why this is so important. Why is an SSD so much better?  There are no moving parts to an SSD. Rather, information is stored in microchips. Conversely, a hard disk drive uses a mechanical arm with a read/write head to move around and read information from the right location on a storage platter. This difference is what makes SSD so much faster.

In recent years, beginning with Apple’s Sierra operation system (10.12), Apple has been optimizing there operating system for faster solid state drives.  In fact, in this years release of Mojave (10.14), Macs with spinning disks are terribly slow.  Very noticeably slower than a machine with a SSD.  If you check the activity monitor you can see that the disk is continuously thrashing as it reads and writes and a spinning disk just can’t keep up.

Many of you may be under the mistaken impression that all Macs have Solid State Drives.  That’s not exactly the case.  If you are in the market for a laptop, you are pretty much golden.  All the MacBooks, MacBook Air’s, and MacBook Pros that are current model machines are now outfitted with a solid state disk.  I can definitely argue that some of these machines are better choices than others depending on a persons individual needs but all of these pass George’s Disk Test.  They have SSD’s installed by default.

If you are looking for a desktop, the MacPro, and now the new Mac mini are all outfitted with the solid state disk too.  But many people are looking for an iMac and that’s where thing become a problem.  iMacs are still sold with spinning disks in the default configuration.  In fact, the lower cost iMacs not only ship with a spinning disk, they ship with a 5400 rpm disk.  We could talk about what the difference in rpm speed is but suffice it to say, these disks were shipping in Macs 15 years ago.  That is how old 5400 rpm drives are.  These disks are way past prime and brand new 3 ghz iMacs equipped with these disks are miserable to use, difficult to update, and overall a poor Mac experience.  There is nothing worse than dropping over a grand on a new Mac only to find it is no faster than your 8 year old machine.

In some configurations, Apple ships a Fusion drive in new iMacs.  A Fusion Drive is two separate drives ‘fused’ together. It contains a Serial ATA drive (that’s a regular hard drive with a spinning plate inside) and a solid-state drive.

MacOS places the more frequently accessed files on the flash storage part of the drive so that they are always quick to obtain, while less frequently used data is stored on the hard drive.

The benefit of this solution is that you get the best of both worlds. Faster operation thanks to the fact that the data you use most regularly is accessed quickly from the Flash part of the Fusion Drive, and a lots of storage space for keeping all your files, photos, movies and more backed up.  While this is much better than a standard spinning drive only configuration, it is still not as fast as a solid state drive for all your storage.  If this is all you can afford, it is acceptable but a better solution might be to get the SSD only in the Mac and add a low cost external drive to expand your storage.

So if you are purchasing a new iMac, stay away from spinning drive machines,  Spend performance you want in a new computer by selecting a machine with a SSD built in.  You will be much happier with your new machine.

So what will I tell people who tell me the SSD machines are just too expensive?  If you can’t swing the extra cost for a machine that performs the way a Mac should…. perhaps you need to be looking at a new PC instead of a Mac.  They are certainly less expensive.



Whats New in MacOS 10.14 – Mojave

Like each update to MacOS, there are hundreds of new features.  Here is a list of the ones I find particularly useful.

Dark Mode

One of the major changes in Mac OS Mojave is the addition of the dark mode. Personally, I find a dark mode to be beautifully stunning. It lets the colors within applications pop and provides a completely new experience in using your Mac. You can turn this on in the system preferences general panel. 

Photos from iPhone

Blink and you might miss it, but Mail hasn’t only gained a button that lets you place emojis in your message, but it gets another that lets you place an image. Click this, and you can choose to use an existing image or directly scan/capture a new one from your iPhone.  This feature is also available from the desktop by Control-clicking on the desktop and selecting Import from iPhone.  For this to work, you iPhone needs to be unlocked and on the same wifi network as your Mac.

Favicons

A favicon is small icon associated with a particular website, usually displayed before the URL in a web browser. Until this release, Safari did not provide support for these cute icons but with this release you can turn favicons. Within safari, go to preferences, tabs, and turned on Show website icons in tabs.

Dynamic Desktop

In system and preferences, desktop and screensavers, a new screen view exists for the desktop. It’s called dynamic desktops and Apple provides one related to the safari motif. The desktop picture on your screen changes over today as the sun would change in the Mojave Desert. A very nice look.

 

Stacks are a great addition to MacOS.  This lets you store files of the same kind such as PDF, JPG, etc in a single icon on the desktop rather than cluttering your desktop with many files.  To turn it on, Control-click on the desktop and select Use Stacks.  In the same location you can set what type of stacks it creates.  I find the Kind method to be the best for me.

Recent apps in the Dock

You’ll like this iPad feature. Icons for the three most recently used apps that you don’t already keep in your Dock will be made visible between the Settings and Downloads icons. This is enabled in System Preferences>Dock using the Show recent applications checkbox.

Automatically keep your Mac updated

Apple has moved Software Updates to its own dedicated pane in System Preferences. Open it, and you can ask your Mac to automatically check for and install software updates. You can also require it to automatically install app updates and security updates for you.

Tighter permissions

Apple has taken a step toward convincing Mac users not to cover their iSight cameras with tape when not in use by introducing new Security System Preferences that will tell you when apps request access to your Camera or microphone. Another security enhancement (available in Notifications) lets you decide if you want to always show notification previews for an app or if you want these to be made visible only when your Mac is unlocked. That’s useful if you work in a public place.

New Screenshot Tool

You have always been able to use Command-Shift-3 to capture the full screen or Command-Shift-4 to capture a section of the screen.  In MacOS Mojave you can now use Command-Shift-5 to bring up a new screen shot tool.  With it you can capture the entire screen, a portion of the screen, or a selected window.  But this tool gives you the ability to capture a video of the screen or a portion of the screen.  There are options to select where to save the file and to set a timer delay for the capture to happen.  

New Mac App Store

Apple first debuted the Mac App Store in 2011 but has given it very little love since then. With macOS Mojave, it is giving the App Store a complete redesign similar to the one it debuted with iOS 11 last year. Apart from the new design, there’s a new Discover tab which would be updated on a weekly basis by editors over at Apple to help you discover new apps.

Gallery View in Finder

The Finder gets a new Gallery View in macOS Mojave which makes it easier to skim through your photos and videos. It also has metadata support which is displayed in the Preview pane so you can quickly see important details of a photo.

With this release, apple has begun the process of making iOS applications work on the Mac.  Apple debutes 4 iOS apps in MacOS Mojave.

Apple News App

macOS finally gets a dedicated Apple News app with a new design. There’s also a sidebar in the app for easy and quick navigation.

Home App

There’s a new Home app in macOS as well that will allow macOS Mojave users to control their HomeKit-enabled accessories easily.

Voice Memo

Another iOS app that is going to be available in macOS Mojave is Voice Memo. Using the app, one can quickly and easily record personal notes, meetings, and more. Voice Memos are also synced across all your devices using iCloud.

Stocks

Finally, the Stocks app is also going coming to macOS Mojave with a brand new interface, personalized watchlist, and interactive charts.  This app is basically the same as the iPad version of the Stocks application.

 

 

Here is a feature you can put in the Not quite there yet file….

Group FaceTime

Apple is debuting Group FaceTime with iOS 12 and the feature is also a part of macOS Mojave. With Group FaceTime, you can make a group video call comprising of up to 32 people. Even better, you can use Animoji, Memoji, stickers, and more while on a FaceTime call now.

This will be added soon in a MacOS update, likely at the same time it gets added too iOS.

I am sure there are quite a few more interesting things in Mojave but those are a few I find most useful.

Look folks, it’s just a scam!

I have heard from a number of people this week that they have gotten calls, mostly on landline phone numbers, from someone reporting to be Apple  telling them that their computer was infected and their accounts with Apple were being discontinued. We’ve seen this happen before and like times before this is just a scam.

The interesting thing this time is those people with caller ID say, this time the Number calling is a local area code. Scammers these days are making it harder and harder to screen your calls.

Let me make a pretty bold statement. Apple, Microsoft, and Google will not call you on your phone to tell you you have a computer problem. They just don’t do that! Anytime you get a call to tell you there’s something wrong with your computer it is someone trying to scam money from you. You can count on this. Ignore those phone calls, Hang up the phone, or cuss the collar out if that makes you feel better but do not allow anyone to connect to your computer remotely unless you know who you’re talking to.

Likewise, if a screen pops up on your computer while your web browsing and tells you your machine is infected and you need to call a phone number, it is a scam. Again, someone is trying to get you to call them and allow them to infect your computer. Sometimes these pop-up screens are hard to get rid of, and often times require you to force quit your browser, but they are not real.

Even secure devices like iPads, iPhones, or chromebooks, are susceptible to this same type scam. These people are using a webpage pop up, many times coming from an ad on that webpage, to make you believe there’s a problem when there really isn’t.

All of these efforts, are called social engineering. Computers have become so secure that it’s very difficult for a nefarious person to get access to your computer on their own. It is much easier to do something that convinces you to infect your self. That’s what they’re trying to do. Don’t let them be successful.

If you are troubleshooting a problem, and you call Apple  or Dell for assistance, sometimes they will ask to connect your computer to look at what’s going on. The big difference here is you initiated the call to Them. It was at your choice and not as a result of some pop up message on your screen or a phone call coming into your home. In this case, it’s likely all right to allow them to connect but if you’re not sure you are much better off consulting with someone who can assist you locally rather than taking the risk.

And so it goes…

Adapters for the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) or USB-C port on your Mac

If the cable from your external display, hard drive, camera, or other device doesn’t connect to the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) or USB-C port on your iMac Pro, iMac, MacBook Pro, or MacBook, you might need an adapter.

Apple has a tech support article describing many of the connected types you may want to use.  While this article is not completely comprehensive everything available, it’s a great place to start.

Posted in Mac

Local Apple user group hosts Q&A at May Meeting

Mark your Calendars!  appleJAC users group in Jefferson City is hosting a Question and Answer meeting at 7pm on May 1st at Immaculate Conception Church, Kennedy Hall.  This is a golden opportunity to get your nagging questions answered on Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, or anything Apple related.  This group, that meets monthly, has a wealth of knowledge relating to all things Apple.  It it was made by Apple, or connects to an apple device, we will do our best to answer you question.

Feel free to bring you computer, phone or tablet along and get those questions you have answered.  Since many people will have questions, you will likely learn about many things you were afraid to ask about. You can ask questions from the floor or write them down and submit them.  There are no dumb questions!

You don’t have to be a member to attend so mark May 1 on your callender and plan to learn more about your Mac, iPhone to iPad..

For more information on appleJAC or the upcoming meeting, check out their website.

Application Specific Passwords for your iCloud Account

App-specific passwords allow you to sign in to your account securely when you use apps that don’t natively support two-step verification or two-factor authentication. There has been quite a bit of conjecture on the internet that very soon, any non Apple application that access iCloud data, like Microsoft Outlook, and specifically Windows machines accessing iCloud information will be required to use an application specific password.

Before creating app-specific passwords, two-factor authentication must be enabled for your Apple ID. As of iOS 10.3 and later, two-factor authentication is automatically setup for new Apple ID accounts. iOS 10.3 also auto-prompts existing accounts to upgrade. This makes sense as apple has been pushing people to use two-factor authentication now in many ways.

To make an app-specific password, do the following:

  1. Sign in to your Apple ID account page at https://appleid.apple.com
  2. In the Security section, click Generate Password below App-Specific Passwords.

  3. Fill in a name for the password you are creating so you can remove it if you desire later
  4. A dialog will come up and show you the password that was generated

  5. After you generate your app-specific password, enter or paste it into the password field of the app as you would normally.

You can have up to 25 active app-specific passwords at any given time. If you need to, you can revoke passwords individually or all at once.

If you want to revoke one of these application specific passwords, in the security section of your applied management page, click on edit.  Then under App specific passwords, click View History.  You will be shown a list of all the application specific passwords you have used.  Click on the one you want to remove and click to remove it.

Get used to this because tighter security is coming to an iCloud account near you very soon.

Cleaning up Your Time Capsule Backup

Erasing a Single Computer from a Time Capsule Drive

Many people use the same hard disk to backup multiple Macs.  This is great particularly when the disk is network attached such as a time capsule.  But over time as you replace machines, sometimes your old backup gets left behind and your drive fills up.  It is easy to remove old machines from the time capsule backup done with time machine.

First you need to mount the drive from your time capsule to your computer.  In the finder sidebar, scroll down to Shared Devices and select the time capsule.

If you have never connected this way to the time capsule, it may ask for a password.

Once connected you should see the Time capsule drive.

Open the folder you see and you will see individual machine icons listed as drive container (Disk) icons.

Now, you can drag any of these containers to the trash and empty the trash.  This might be a good time to go get a cup of coffee because it often takes quite a while to delete.

You may need to unplug the time capsule and plug it back in to get it to recognize the additional space has been cleaned up,

Erasing the entire Time Capsule Drive

If all else fails you may need to completely erase the time capsule drive.  This will of course delete the backups from all the machines using it and require you to reconfigure the backup for those machines.  Start by opening Airport Utility and selecting the Time Capsule.

Click Edit and select the Disks tab.

Press Erase and confirm you want to erase the disk.  Now take that coffee break as the disk is being erased.  You can close Airport utility and the Time Capsule will finish on it’s own but will still take some time.

Pruning old backups from your Time Machine Drive

If you want to delete olde backup files from your Time machine drive, take a look at this article.  The first portion tells how to do it with the time machine interface.  The second part might not be advised since it requires using terminal commands.

Which Hard Drive do I choose for backing up my Macintosh or my PC?

Q: With all the choices, which Hard Drive do I choose for backing up my Macintosh with Time Machine or my PC?

A: I wish there was a simple answer, but unfortunately there isn’t one.  Choosing a backup drive involves a number of factors that need to be take into account.  Many of these factors depend on the type of machine you have and the size of your original harddisk.  In this article, I am going to look at a number of decision points and attempt to provide some assistance in making that selection.

Internal vs External

Raw drives are drive mechanisms that are sold without a case,   These drives are intended to be installed inside the computer box.  For Mac users, this decision point is simple.  None of the current or recent Macintosh machines can support adding an internal drive.  If you use a PC, and have a tower yo use an internal drive but then you have to open the case and install it.  While usually not too difficult to do, it just adds one more possibility to get things configured wrong.  There was a time where raw drives were much less expensive but that time has passed. So, in my opinion, external is the answer.

Brand

These day, there are many brands of drive available at your local Staples or Best Buy.  The brand of the drive actually has little to do with the quality of the unit.  The actual harddisk mechanism inside the box is likely made by 1 of 3 manufacturers and telling the difference between them is not really important.  It really all boils down to case design, interfaces and price.

Don’t be fooled by vendors that want you to spend more money for either a “Mac” version of a drive or for a “premium” model.  The drive mechanism is likely the same part.  Mac formatted drives are just that, pre formatted for a mac.  That is no big deal because you can easily reformat a PC formatted drive on the Mac.  In fact, time machine recognizes a new drive plugged in and asks to reformat it if it is a PC model.  Don’t pay extra for this formatting alone.

Also don’t pay extra for backup software.  Time Machine, which is a builtin feature of MacOS 10.5 Leopard or newer, is better than any of these backup solutions that ship with new drives.  Only consider backup software if you are using 10.4 or older on a Mac and in my opininon, your money is better spent upgrading a current MacOS release to do your backups if your machine will handle it.

For PC users, it depends on the operating system.  In Windows 7 or 8, backup is a control panel that you can configure.  In Windows 10, it is called File History.  Select the Start​ button, select Settings > Update & security > Backup > Add a drive, and then choose an external drive or network location for your backups.

All that said, I do have a couple of favorite brands.  Both Seagate and Western Digital make fair priced external drives that work very well.  There are a number of models available and best of all, you can get them locally at the Best Buy of Staples store.  When I recommend a drive, I choose one of these two.  One of them is usually in the weekly ad from Best Buy or Staples and on sale.

Desktop vs Portable drive

Either a desktop or portable drive will work fine.  Portable drives are usually smaller, have less capacity, and cost more.  If you are using a desktop Mac, purchase a desktop drive.  There is little reason to spend the extra for the portable one.  If however you are using a laptop, you may want to still purchase a desktop drive.

Desktop drives are usually made from a more available, more reliable and larger mechanism.  These drives usually use a 3 ½” drive mechanism.  These drives are available in larger sizes and at less cost.  Portable drives use a 2 ½” mechanism just like those used in laptops.  These are smaller, have less capacity, use less power, but cost more.

One important consideration is that a Desktop drive will need to be plugged into electricity while a portable drive usually is self powered from the USB or the Firewire bus.  This is nice for travel since you don’t have to plug it in to power, just the computer.

If you own a laptop, but use it quite a bit in one place, a desktop drive is likely a better solution.  If you want a backup drive that can travel with you, choose a portable drive for that application.

Size

My recommendation is to think of the future and purchase a drive as large as you can afford.  You will be amazed at how data accumulates and how fast you fill the drive you have.  Raw drive mechanisms are available as large as 6Tb today.  External desktop drives are available that large also but the real sweet spot here today is the 2Tb or 3Tb drive.  Portable drives are available as large as 4Tb with their sweet spot being at the 1TB to 2TB level.

On a Mac Time machine is very smart.  It will use all the space you give it and continue to keep copies of data from the past.  The general thing to remember is always select a drive twice the size of the internal drive you want to backup if you can.  This way you have plenty of space for multiple backups in time machine.  This gives you the most flexibility.

On a PC, you may need to ‘prune’ you backup when it fills the drive,  You can manage the backup space in the same location that you setup the backup in Windows.

Interface (ports)

Drive makers, including Western Digital and Seagate make many models.  One of the many considerations for drive pricing is the type of interface ports the drive has.  Some of the common interfaces you’ll see are:

USB – all drives these days include USB 3.0.  USB 3 drives are backward compatible with USB 2 so no matter if your machine supports only USB 2, get a USB 3 or 3.1 drive.  Newer machines may have a USB-C style connecter so be sure to check that out before bringing a drive home.  If your machine supports USB-C, use that connection because it will provide the fastest throughput.  If the drive you chose still uses a USB 3 port, a cheep USB-C to female USB 3 adapter can be had for less than $10.

Firewire – In past years, I would have always recommended that you use Firewire.  But these days, Firewire is a dead technology.  If you have a Firewire port on your computer and you want to use it, be sure to select a drive that has both a Firewire and a USB interface to future proof your purchase.  Firewire drives may be hard to find since the technology is being phased out..  Some Macs like the new Macbooks and Macbook Air do not have Firewire at all.

eSATA – External SATA.  SATA is the native interface od all of todays drives.  The External version of this is called eSATA.  This connection is only available on some tower PC’s and is problematic so I recommend considering it.

Ethernet – This port allows a drive to work connected directly to an Ethernet network.  It is technically called Network Accessible Storage or NAS.  This is what Apple did in the time capsule (a great but more expensive backup unit).  Having this port allows a drive to hang on a network rather than be connected to a machine.  But, it is important to note, these drives are not compatible with Time Machine unless you use the Apple Time Capsule.  If you need some extra traditional storage that you may want to share, this is a good option but for Time Machine, it is is only a consideration if the drive is advertised to support it.  One such drive is the Western Digital My Cloud.  It supports time machine and a lot more. I use one as a secondary backup and while not as fast as directly attached storage, it works great.

So what do you get?  My recommendation here is to get a drive uses USB 3.  Some newer drives may have USB-C connections, and I suspect we will see this a lot more in the future but for now, converting to USB-C if that is the only port your machine has (2015, 2016 MacBook or 2016 MacBook Pro) is simple and inexpensive.

Price

Drive prices have dropped a lot lately.  Price should be one of the last things to think about.  My recommendation is to purchase drives near the sweet pricing spots I described above.  These are the ones in the Sunday circulars. Again, I recommend you purchase a drive as large as you can afford.  Larger drives above the sweet spot size will cost a little more and are usually fine choices if you have a great deal to backup.  These larger drives will become tomorrow’s sweet spot and cost will go down.

What will it cost?  Today, in February 2017, an 1 Tb USB external drive costs between $59 and $79 depending on features and sales.  A desktop 5Tb drive runs about $129 to $149.  With prices this low, more is always better.

Conclusions

All this is probably much more than you want to know about backup drives.  These conclusions will be my opinions of what you should get in a nutshell:

•    Consider as a first choice a Western Digital or Seagate drive
•    Get a desktop Model unless you need to backup your laptop on the road
•    Size the drive a minimum of twice the size of your internal drive
•    Get a drive with a USB 3 port even if you don’t have a computer with USB 3. Someday you will and USB 3 is much faster than USB 2.
•    Watch the weekly circulars.  Drives are always on sale