How Do You Know if Your Time Machine Is Working
Don't go caught without a backup if your Mac crashes.
Óscar Gutiérrez/CNETBacking upwards your Mac is one of those routine tasks that can air current upward cached below the more urgent priorities on your to-do list. But if your MacBook or iMac crashes at an inopportune time -- as computers always seem to do -- you'll exist infinitely grateful you took a few minutes to salvage all your important files. A backup also makes information technology piece of cake to motility your apps and data to a new Mac if y'all upgrade to a new auto, like the newly announced Mac Studio desktop or the rumored M2 MacBook Pro.
With so many cloud storage services bachelor that can automatically sync your files, such equally Dropbox or Google Drive, it'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to only set it and forget it. But deject drives can't back up everything on your figurer. For example, they don't remember the local coffee shop's complicated Wi-Fi countersign or every setting you've changed that's finally made booting your Mac feel as familiar equally sinking into a comfortable couch.
Apple makes backing up relatively painless past including its Time Automobile app in the Mac operating arrangement, which yous can schedule to run a full fill-in of your Mac. You don't have to practice a thing after the initial setup process, which takes only a few minutes.
Below I'll walk you through using Time Machine, cover how to bank check what iCloud is keeping a backup of and for those who desire some extra assurance, how to back up your Music library.
Time Machine is where it's at.
Sarah Tew/CNETUse Time Motorcar to support your Mac
Equally long as information technology knows where to store the files, Time Machine can be set to periodically fill-in your calculator, though you can also manually trigger a backup. In fact, when you lot connect an external hard drive or SSD to your Mac, yous may see a prompt asking if yous want to use the drive with Fourth dimension Automobile.
Once Time Machine is prepare up, it will create and shop one backup every hour for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and one fill-in a week for all previous months until it runs out of space. Once the backup drive is total, it will brand room past deleting the oldest backups.
Equally far as how big of a drive to get, the dominion of pollex is ane.5 to ii times the size of your Mac'southward hard bulldoze. For example, if your Mac has 512GB of storage, you'll want a 1TB drive. Y'all can find an external difficult drive or SSD for relatively piffling, and nosotros even take ahandy guide to the best drives.
The drive can be directly connected to your Mac or connected via your network.
Apple's supported options are:
- External USB, Thunderbolt or FireWire drive connected to your Mac
- Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Fourth dimension Machine over SMB
- Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination
- External bulldoze connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac) or Drome Time Capsule
- AirPort Time Capsule (technically discontinued, but still bachelor as a refurb)
To begin, plug the bulldoze into your Mac and wait for the prompt to use information technology with Time Machine. If your Mac forgets its manners and doesn't ask, select the drive to utilise by going toSystem Preferences >Time Machine and clicking theSelect Disk push button.
If information technology'south not already formatted to work as a backup drive, Time Motorcar will enquire if you want to format the drive. Doing so volition erase anything on the drive, and so make sure there'due south nothing on the drive you don't want to lose.
When selecting your bulldoze for Time Machine, you can also choose to encrypt backups. Encryption ways restoring from the Time Machine fill-in will crave a password. If yous want it to back up at regular intervals, brand certain to check the box next toSupport Automatically.
Click theOptions push in Fourth dimension Motorcar'south console in System Preferences to indicate what types of items you'd like Time Machine to exclude. Excluding items can speed upwardly the process, but you can still use your Mac while its running in the background. Older Macs might feel a bit sluggish during the backup process, though.
At that place is also an option toEvidence Time Car in bill of fare bar. The bill of fare bar icon lets you go along an centre on the status of the backup, stop it and manually offset a backup.
To restore your system or fifty-fifty a single file to a previous point, click the carte bar and chooseEnter Time Machine. You'll see your previous Time Machine backups arranged similar cards in a rolodex. Whorl through, find the one you lot want and click theRestore button.
Organize your files before creating a backup so you don't exit anything behind.
Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNETiCloud backs up some stuff, but not everything
Where Time Motorcar is a complete arrangement backup, iCloud only stores selected files and information. You tin run across a list of everything that's currently existence synced and stored in your iCloud account underSystem Preferences >Internet Accounts >iCloud. Naturally, this can be express past the amount of data in your iCloud or Apple Ane subscription. The gratuitous default is a mere 5GB of iCloud infinite.
Click theOptions push next to iCloud Drive to come across the files and folders that are stored in your account. Information technology should include your Desktop and Documents folders, along with any apps y'all utilise that store data in iCloud Drive.
Buying a new Mac? Here'southward a listing of the all-time MacBooks in 2022 and the best MacBook deals happening now. Plus, you should get a Mac VPN.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/how-to-backup-mac-to-icloud-time-machine/
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