How to use Time Machine to backup your Mac?

Want to back up your Mac and prevent unintentional data loss? Apple’s built-in feature, Time Machine, allows users to easily create a backup of personal files, including photos, apps, music, documents, and emails.

With a backup in place, you can easily restore inaccessible data to your computer, which is quite helpful for times when you accidentally remove important files or hard reset your system.

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Know how to backup your Mac using the in-built Time Machine app

Follow these steps to backup your Mac files:

1) Connect an external storage drive to the Mac.

The best ones to use are an external USB drive and a Thunderbolt drive; however, you can also use another Mac, a NAS (Network-attached storage) drive, or an AirPort Time Capsule. Ideally, reserve it for backup purposes only.

Make sure to use a storage drive that features at least twice the capacity of every disk and volume you want to back up. The app will notify you if it doesn’t have enough space.

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2) Set up the drive for Time Machine

When you connect the drive to a Mac, a "Time Machine can back up your Mac” dialog will pop up, allowing you to set up the drive to back up files. Select Options, and then choose Set Up to use this disk as a backup disk with Time Machine.

Alternatively, open the Apple menu and click on System Settings. Next, select General in the sidebar, then select Time Machine on the right. Click on the Add button or the Add Backup Disk option.

Next, point to the location of the storage drive you connected to the system to use it as a backup drive.

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Once the backup drive is set up, the service will automatically start backing up files on a Mac. It initiates hourly, daily, and weekly backups at a fixed time. This frequency can be changed from the app's settings: Navigate to Options > Back up frequency menu to find options.

Note that the first backup process may take a while to complete, but one can continue using the Mac while it is in progress. Eventually, the service will only back up those files that have changed since the last save, thus making the process much faster.

Apple allows users to induce a manual backup, apart from the automatic one, by clicking on the Back Up Now option. They can also choose which drives and volumes to exclude. Simply go to the app's settings, select Options, and click on Add to select an item to be excluded.