A wise man said ‘Always take a backup.’ Indeed, one of the wisest thing you can implement in today’s world. Taking a backup of your files, photos, videos, email and other data is very important. You never know when your hard drive fails. If you use a Mac, then you can easily use Time Machine which is Mac OS X’s very own backup app. The setup is extremely easy and this app works quite well. You do not need any complex third party programs in order to perform backups on your Mac.
Time Machine is an easy backup solution comes in Mac OS X. It backups all your data – photos, documents, videos, email and even Mac OS X installation files from time to time on an external drive. It has made taking backups easy. Not only taking backups is easy. You can restore from any backup with just a few clicks.
Time Machine works with any hard drive – USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt and Network drives. The Network drive needs to have Apple File Protocol (AFP) sharing, in order to take Time Machine backups on that network drive. Time Machine takes hourly, daily and weekly backups. It automatically deletes the old backup to make space for new one. I recommend you to purchase a drive five times bigger than your Mac’s drive. If your Mac has 500 GB of hard disk or 512 GB SSD then a drive with storage space more than 2.5 TB would be recommended.
In this tutorial, we will see how to enable Time Machine on your Mac and this process is very easy to follow so even a novice can follow the steps. But make sure you don’t skip any of the listed steps.
Enable Time Machine Backups on your Mac
- Considering that you have connected the backup drive to your Mac.
- From the Apple Menu, select ‘System Preferences.’
- A new window will open up. Now look for and choose Time Machine.
- This will start Time Machine on your Mac. Now lets get to set it up.
- Turn on the off slider to ‘ON.’
- Select Backup Disk from the disk options.
- When you click on the Use Disk button, you will be asked if you are OK with the data that will be deleted from the drive.
- This is important so go ahead and choose Erase.
- Now you need to wait until the formatting is complete.
- It will format your drive and start back up within two minutes.
You can easily restore your Mac to a previous Time Machine backup. In case your hard drive fails, you can reinstall Mac OS X on your new drive and use Time Machine backup to get back your data and settings. So, this was a small tutorial in which I showed you how to easily set up Time Machine on your Mac. Let me know in comments below if you have any sort of queries.
