I use TextEdit as my ongoing “journal” notebook. But the document is quite sizable now, and autosaving has become a significant event—and every 5 minutes (the maximum offered in the preferences) is too frequent for this interruption to occur. Do you know how to change this value with the Terminal? That’s how I adjusted the number of recent items in my menu, and I’d love to fix this as well.

So you’re keeping your entire journal in one TextEdit file? We see how the “free” factor might trump dedicated journaling apps like MacJournal ($39.95, marinersoftware.com, 4 stars in Nov/08, p65) or Mémoires ($29.95, codingrobots.com), but doesn’t that one big text file get unwieldy? Wouldn’t a new file for each day, week, or month work too? Up to you--we’ll stop wondering and answer your question.

TextEdit’s preference file, called com.apple.TextEdit, is kept in your ~/Library/Preferences/ folder. So we fired up Terminal, typed defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit and pressed Return to have Terminal read the default settings in that file. The list was pretty extensive, but we didn’t notice anything that would adjust the autosave interval. So we’re skeptical that a Terminal command could fix that--Apple only added autosave to TextEdit as of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, so maybe it will be expanded in future versions.

ForeverSave's autosave intervals top out at 60, which can be seconds, minutes, or even hours.

In the meantime, you could set TextEdit’s autosave to Never, and instead use ForeverSave ($14.95, tool-forcesw.com/foreversave/). This utility will automatically save files in the applications of your choice at the interval of your choice--up to 60 hours. You can even exclude folders, in case you want to isolate your journal entries in one folder and exclude everything else.

Another tip: Dropbox (free up to 2GB, dropbox.com) automatically keeps versions of the files you store in your Dropbox folder, but you have to access the previous versions by logging in to your account on its website, dropbox.com. Once there, mouse over the file in question and click the down-facing blue arrow on the far right, which shows a menu including a Previous versions link. So as long as you save that TextEdit file to Dropbox, it’ll always have your last copy available, and you won’t lose your journal if your Mac’s hard drive goes kaput.

Dropbox keeps old versions of the files you save there.