The important thing is to remember that while Time Machine backs up regularly, it will only do so if your Mac is connected to the device you are backing up to. If you don’t see this icon (it looks like a clock with a curved arrow) you can create a shortcut to the Time Machine preferences in the form of a Time Machine icon in the menu on the right-hand side of the top of your screen. This icon was present in El Capitan but disappeared after Sierra launched in 2016. If you don’t already have a shortcut to the Time Machine menu it will be easier for you if you set one up. If you do that you will need a password to access your backups

You can choose to Encrypt your backups.

Choose Backup Disk, select the storage device you wish to back up to, and click Use Disk.

If you don’t see the alert, open Time Machine preferences from System Preferences > Time Machine.

As long as the drive is formatted correctly, you should see an alert on your Mac asking if you want to use the drive with Time Machine.

Time Machine finally gets support for APFS in macOS Big Sur.

In Big Sur Apple has made it possible to choose between HFS+ or APFS for the Time Machine back up – note that you will need to be running Big Sur on the Mac that you try to recover an APFS backup onto.It will need to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) – if it isn’t,.Your Mac needs to be running Mac OS X Leopard or later but we’d recommend updating to the latest version of the Mac Operating System.īest SSDs, to help you find the best option for backing up to. You can also use Time Machine to back up to a server on your network as long as it’s running macOS Server, We’d advise getting a unit offering at least 1TB if you can afford it. This could be a USB, Firewire or Thunderbolt hard drive or SSD that you plug into your Mac, or a NAS drive which your Mac connects to via a WiFi network. You’ll need a reasonably large external storage device. All your settings and all your files and folders will be just as you left them.We’ll cover how to recover your Mac using the Time Machine back up, and how to copy your Time Machine backup to a new Mac, below. But when you do get to that point the older backups will be deleted to make space for new ones.Īll this backing up means that if you ever get a new Mac you can use your Time Machine back up to ‘recover’ your old Mac onto your new Mac.

The other benefit is that because Time Machine isn’t backing up your whole Mac every time, it shouldn’t take a whole lot of space up on your backup drive.

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