Do you use your Mac at home or at work and still haven’t bothered to make backups? You may not know that time machine backups on Mac are extremely fast, practical and safe.
Time Machine is a tool integrated into the Mac operating system that allows you to make and schedule (incremental) backups of your computer in a completely automatic way or even perform backups manually. Using backup on Mac with time machine you can at any time and in an extremely simple and fast way recover a single file or restore the operating system.
Without getting too lost in chatter, I will explain in this article how to configure time machine and how to make backups on Mac with Time Machine.
Index
- Backup on Mac with Time Machine
- Time Machine configuration
- Start backups manually with Time Machine
Backup on Mac with Time Machine
Time Machine is a very powerful tool that requires a small and simple initial setup in order to be used. In the next paragraph I’ll explain how to perform the initial Time Machine configuration and how to enable automatic backups.
Time Machine configuration
First of all it must be said that for backups on Mac with time machine it is necessary to have an external disk (if you do not have an external disk, read this article to find your way around a disk to buy). Then connect the USB disk to your mac and open the Time Machine control panel by pressing the button with the symbol of a clock in the menu at the top right (or alternatively by opening the applications and selecting System Preferences and then selecting Time Machine From here click on the Select backup disk button and on the next screen select the external disk you will use for backups, if you want to encrypt the backups, uncheck the Encrypt backup item .
If the external drive does not contain valid Time Machine formatting, you will be prompted to initialize it; in this case, click on Initialize to continue taking into account that all the files on the external disk will be deleted.
If you check the item Back up automatically Time machine will perform automatic backups and you will not have to worry about anything. In this way you will always have at your disposal
- hourly backups for the last 24 hours
- daily backups for the last month
- weekly backups for all previous months
In addition, Time Machine will automatically manage the disk space by deleting the oldest backups when the disk is almost full. Obviously, automatic backups are the recommended choice and you will still have to leave the USB disk connected to your Mac at all times. Backups are performed invisibly and you can safely use the mac when a backup on a Mac with time machine is in progress.
The first backup will take a long time but the following ones will be fast; this is because backups with Time Machine are incremental (ie only new files or those that have undergone changes since the last backup are backed up).
You can exclude some items from backups by clicking on the Options button and then on the Add (+) button and selecting the items not to be included in the backups
Start backups manually with Time Machine
So far we have seen how to configure automatic backups on Mac with time machines; but sometimes it is essential to perform a backup manually. For example, before every update of the operating system or a change that can still impact the proper functioning of the computer, it is a good idea to perform a backup manually so that, in case of problems, you can easily go back by restoring the backup.
With Time Machine, making a backup manually takes just one click. In fact, to start the backup on Mac with time machine, press the right mouse button on the key with the symbol of a clock present in the mac menu at the top right and from the menu that appears, choose the item Back up now.
