Depending on the number of files on your computer and the type of drive you’re using, this could take several hours. Once a drive is selected, Time Machine will begin its initial backup.

Once you do, macOS will show this dialog box: Simply buy a hard drive and plug it into your Mac. Time Machine is incredibly easy to set up. The bigger the drive, the deeper Time Machine’s archives can go. Since Time Machine will do this until the hard drive it is using becomes full, we recommend dedicating an entire hard drive to it, and one that is at least twice the size of your internal disk. It also means that if you delete a file or folder from your Mac, Time Machine will keep a copy around for a while, giving you a window of time in which it can be recovered. In practice, this means that if you added one sentence to a Pages document every day, at the end of the month, you’d be able to retrieve a copy reflecting each and every edit point. Any time a file is changed, Time Machine backs it up, making recovery of a specific version of a file fast and simple. The best part of Time Machine, however, is its ability to keep multiple copies of files. By default, it will copy everything on your Mac - system files, applications, accounts, preferences, email messages, music, photos, movies, documents, and more. It is automatic, backing up every hour without any user intervention. In a nutshell, this means that if you could snap your fingers and make one Mac user’s main hard drive disappear, there’s a 96 percent chance that you just destroyed files that are completely unrecoverable. That actually doesn’t sound too bad until you get to the next question. Only 80 percent?) Twenty-six percent said they do back up their data. On page 14 of his Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard review, John Siracusa talks about Time Machine (which debuted in 2007 with Leopard) and shares some (pre-Leopard) backup stats of Mac users based on a poll Apple took:Įighty percent of Mac users said they knew they should back up their data. It’s easy to set up and use, and creates an excellent safety net for those who wish to back up their data to a locally-attached external hard drive. Time Machine is Apple’s solution for the everyday Mac customer.

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