how do i backup my mac with time machine

My iMac is a different matter, and it is permanently attached to a large drive array for continuous backups. That means that I could lose up to a week or so of work, but since I save all of my important work 'in the cloud' to Dropbox, I'm not as concerned about not having an updated backup. For my MacBook Air, for example, I try to remember to plug in the backup drive once a week. With Macs that aren't always connected to their backup drives, Time Machine backups will only occur when the drive is physically connected. How often should you back up your Mac? If you have a desktop machine and the drive is connected to your Mac permanently, then backups are going to happen every hour by default. Subsequent backups take a lot less time, as only changes to your Mac are being backed up. Note that the first backup is going to take a while. If the drive is in a format that the Mac recognizes, it will ask you if you want to use the drive to back up with Time Machine:Ĭlick 'Use as Backup Disk,' and Time Machine begins to back up your Mac (see below). If the drive is formatted for Windows, you might want to use the Mac Disk Utility (found in the Utilities folder, which you can pull up by selecting Utilities from the Finder Go menu, or just look in your Applications folder) to erase the drive and format it as Mac OS Extended (journaled). The Mac will recognize the drive and mount it (make it available for use).

For the MacBook Air, it's going to be USB 2.0, since that's the only external port available. Once you have the hard drive available, connect it to your new Mac via USB, FireWire, or eSATA - whatever connection both the drive and your Mac share. If you can afford it, go with a 1 TB or larger drive. A quick look at OWC's website and Amazon shows USB bus-powered portable drives ranging from around $50 for the 320 GB drives up to $80 or so for 500 GB drives. Multiply that number by two or three, and you get a range of 320 to 480 GB. Let's say, as an example, that you're going to be backing up data on a new 11' MacBook Air that has a 160 128 GB SSD built in. Here at TUAW, our recommendation is 'buy the biggest drive you can afford.' That's a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast rule. Apple recommends that you use a hard drive that is approximately two to three times the amount of data you're going to be backing up. The first thing you'll need to do is buy an external hard drive. Setting up your new Mac with Time Machine You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu.

How do i backup my mac with time machine