If you store anything on your Mac that is even remotely important – photos, documents, whatever, you need to back it up. Sure, you can use Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, or Backblaze, but one of the simplest options is built right into OS X. It’s called Time Machine.
All you really need to do is buy a cheap external hard drive (1 TB usually costs between $60-100), attach it to your Mac, and run the Time Machine app once. Then OS X will take care of everything for you. Is that correct? Let’s find out together.
How does the time machine work?
Once Time Machine is set up and connected to the external drive, it performs multiple backups. Time Machine will back up new content hourly, plus it will keep a daily backup for the last month and a weekly backup for several months.
It keeps adding new content so there are no duplicate backups here. Also, if it runs out of memory, Time Machine will delete only the oldest backups. If you’re buying an external hard drive, make sure it’s at least twice the size of the hard drive or SSD in your Mac.
Related: Learn about 8 ways to free up space on your Mac.
How to enable time machine backup
Attach an external drive using USB or Thunderbolt before you begin. Now, go to System Preferences or use Apple menu or use Featured search.
Here, locate Time machine options and click the icon.
You will see a switch on the left. Just click on it to turn on Time Machine.
This will open a menu showing all the hard drives and partitions where you can use Time Machine. If you’re using an AirPort Express or Time Capsule, you’ll find it here, too. If not, select the last option to set up.
In my case I prepared a partition to call Time Machine HD (see how to do it with an external hard drive here). I’ll pick that one and click Disk Usage.
That’s it, within a few seconds, the backup will start automatically.
Should you encrypt backups? The rule of thumb is that if you can code, you should. Especially if your backups will carry important data. If you encrypt a backup, the chances that someone accidentally finds your hard drive and can extract your data from it is extremely small. Even so, you should know that encrypting the drive for the first time will take a lot of time. It could be hours.
How to exclude folders from backup
If you don’t want to back up any specific folders, open Time machine application again and click Option.
Here, select + and select the folder/file you want to exclude. Click Rescue and you’re done.
How to recover files from time machine
All the backups in the world won’t do you any good if you really can’t restore them. Time Machine is well equipped in this respect. You can easily select a file and restore it, or restore an entire backup if something goes wrong with your Mac.
If you want to recover individual files, you will need access Time machine window and select the file you want to recover. And the only way to get there is to click Time machine option in the menu bar and select Enter the time machine.
To enable the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, go to the Time Machine settings window and enable the option from the bottom.
How to restore a full time machine backup
If you want to replace everything on your current hard drive with a Time Machine backup, you need to do that from the boot menu.
When you power on your Mac, hold down the . button Cmd + CHEAP keys. You will now enter a screen that says OS X Utilities.
From here, select Restore from Time Machine Backup and click Continue.
On the next page, select Restore your system and click Continue. Select your Time Machine backup, click continue in the next two menus, and that’s it.
If you’re running a completely blank hard drive, you can also boot directly into a Time Machine backup. Simply hold Select during boot and select the drive from the menu.
Now, relax
Knowing that your data is safe is a good feeling, isn’t it? You know what is even a better feeling? There are multiple backups. We discussed this strategy and more in the Ultimate Guide to OS X Yosemite, which you should check out here.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
