How To Back Up Your Mac
How To Use Time Machine To Back Up Your Mac
Time Machine is the best way to back up your Mac. Since macOS has Time Machine built-in, all you need to use it is an external drive. If you don't have one, you should seriously consider buying an external drive for Mac backups.
Most backup solutions save a single snapshot of your Mac from the last time you backed it up. Each time you back up your Mac, it replaces that snapshot with a new one.
In contrast, Time Machine keeps countless snapshots of your Mac dating back weeks, months, and even years.
This means you can revert your entire Mac or a particular file on your Mac to the state it was in on a certain date. You can use Time Machine to recover long-lost files, undo new changes to a document, or travel back to a time before malware infected your Mac.
A Time Machine backup includes absolutely everything on your Mac: photos, documents, user preferences, and third-party apps. If you replace your Mac, change the hard drive, or wipe it clean, it's easy to restore a Time Machine backup and recover every piece of data you lost.
Step 1. Get An External Drive To Use With Time Machine
Time Machine creates a backup of your Mac on an external drive. You can use USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire to connect a drive to your Mac, although you may need to use an adapter if your Mac doesn't have the right ports.
Apple used to offer a product called Time Capsule, which let you back up your Mac with Time Machine over Wi-Fi. But now, your only option to use Time Machine wirelessly is with a NAS hard drive.
As Time Machine saves multiple snapshots of your Mac, it's a good idea to make sure your external drive has about twice as much storage as your computer, if not more. Open the Apple menu and go to About This Mac > Storage to see how much storage your Mac has.
Either way, it's a good idea to remove any important files from your external drive before setting it up for use with Time Machine, as you may need to erase the drive to reformat it.
Step 2. Select Your Drive In The Time Machine Preferences
When you connect an external drive to your Mac for the first time, you should see a prompt asking if you'd like to use this drive with Time Machine. Choose to Use as Backup Disk to set that drive as your Time Machine destination.
We recommend you enable the option to Encrypt Backup Disk. This keeps your data secure in the event that someone else gets hold of your external drive. Create a password to use for your backup and don't lose it.
You can't restore an encrypted backup if you forget the password.
If the prompt to use your connected drive doesn't appear automatically, open the Apple menu and go to System Preferences > Time Machine. Then click Select Disk and choose your drive from the available disks.
Time Machine prompts you to erase and reformat your external drive if it's in the wrong format. This deletes all the data on your drive, so be sure to remove any important files first.
Step 3. Create Automatic Or Manual Time Machine Backups
After selecting an external drive to use for backups, Time Machine automatically creates hourly backups whenever that drive is connected.
To start a new backup manually, click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and select Back Up Now. If you can't see the Time Machine icon, go to System Preferences > Time Machine and enable the Show Time Machine in menu bar option.
You can view the progress of your backup in the Time Machine preferences or by clicking the Time Machine icon in the menu bar. The first backup might take several hours, but subsequent backups should be much faster.
Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past week, weekly backups for the past month, and monthly backups for the past year.
When your external drive fills up, Time Machine deletes the oldest backups to create more space.
Click Enter Time Machine from the menu bar icon if you ever need to restore a Time Machine backup.
Related Courses And Certification
Basic Computer Skills - Course and Certification
Computer Programming Course and Certification
