Backing Up with Time Machine

Speaker: In this video, we’re going to look at how we can back up our Mac with Time Machine. I feel that this is one of the most important videos in the tutorial. Why is that? Because hard drives fail, if your hard drive were to fail on your Mac, there’s a chance that you could lose everything. You want to make sure you have a backup. With Time Machine, Apple made it easy to backup your computer. Also, as a side benefit with Time Machine, you can restore files from an earlier backup. We’ll talk about that in the next lesson.

Let’s first look at how easy it is to set up your Mac to backup. Let’s go to my Mac. If we look here on my desktop, you will see I have My Book Time Machine. This is my backup. How did I set this up? What I did is I went out and bought a new USB external hard drive, and I plugged it into the Mac or the computer. My iMac recognized that and said, “Do you want to use this as a Time Machine backup?” I said, “Yes.” From that point on, my computer was backing up. That’s how easy it is to backup your Mac.

The nice thing is this backup backs up everything on your computer. Let’s go ahead and double click on this to see. I double click on it, you’re going to see I have my backups here. I double click on it again, I have my iMac, and it’s backing up everything on my iMac, all of my applications, all of my user folders. It’ll even backup external hard drives. Now I have my Drobo excluded from being backed up. I’ll show you how you can do that later on in the lesson. We can also exclude specific folders and hard drives from being backed up. If you don’t want any folder to be backed up or an external hard drive to be backed up, you can exclude those.

Let’s go and open this up; I double click on it. Now you’re going to see all of my different backups. What are all these backups here? What happens is, every hour that you’re using your computer, Time Machine will back up your Mac. What it does is it keeps those hourly backups for 24 hours. If you were to throw away a file from a backup 12 hours ago, what you’re able to do is you’re ready to go back 12 hours and restore that file. We’ll talk about restoring data in the next lesson.

What it does is it keeps your backups that it creates every hour for 24 hours. After that, what it does is it keeps daily backups for the last month. After 24 hours, instead of keeping an hourly backup, what it does is it keeps a daily backup, and it does this for a month. After that, it keeps a weekly backup. It keeps an hourly backup for 24 hours, a daily backup for a month, and then after that, it keeps weekly backups. It does this all automatically. Again, what we’re able to do is we’re able to restore files from these backups. Again, I’ll talk about that in the next lesson.

All these folders here are my backups. Now we do have a few settings, not many. Apple tried to make this easy, but we do have a few settings for Time Machine. I’m going to close this window, and now I’m going to go down to my system preferences. This is where we will find our Time Machine preferences, click on it, and now go over to Time Machine. Again, we do not have a lot of options here. Our first option here is to backup automatically. This is checked by default, and I highly recommend leaving it checked.

Over to the right, we have our Time Machine information. I can see how much space I have left on my external hard drive for backing up; I can see what the oldest backup was, I can see what the latest backup was and then I can also see when the next backup is going to be. I can get a little snapshot of what Time Machine is doing by just looking at this. To the left, we have select disk. This is where I can go and select a disk for using Time Machine. If I were to plug in a hard drive, and I wanted to use it for Time Machine, my Mac didn’t say, “Do you want to use this as Time Machine?” What I can do is I can click on select disk, and then I can just select from my available disks.

I can also select a disk that I didn’t want to use earlier as a Time Machine backup. As an example, I have Drobo here. My Mac asked me if I wanted to use it as a backup earlier, I said no. Now what I can do is I can click on Drobo, and I’ll use it as a backup. This is where we can set which disks we use as a backup. If I wanted to use my Noteboom 2TB as a Time Machine backup, I click on this, and then I select use disk.

What’s nice about this is I can use more than one external hard drive as a Time Machine backup. You can see I have My Book Time Machine, if I were to click on use disk, it would add it to my backup disks here so we can use more than one hard drive. Why would you want to use more than one hard drive? Again, hard drives fail, so what you may want to do is you may want to add a third hard drive. If your iMac drive fails and then your external hard drive for Time Machine fails, you will have it on a third hard drive. You could even go as far as plugin a third hard drive, let it backup, unplug it and then store it off-site so then you have an off-site backup. You would plug that in every once in a while, maybe once a month or once a week, to get your latest backup.

We have a lot of options with Time Machine, and it’s relatively easy to do. We just plug in the hard drive, it’ll back up, unplug it, put it off-site. We need another backup for that off-site backup; we plug it back into our iMac, it’ll back up. I’m going to click on cancel. You’re also going to see down here we have a little snapshot of what Time Machine keeps. Remember how I mentioned how often Time Machine backs up? Here’s where that is. It keeps an hourly backup for 24 hours, a daily backup for the past month, and a weekly backup for all previous months.

You’re also going to see that it says the oldest backups are deleted when your disk becomes full. You do not want to use Time Machine as an archive; it will eventually delete files. If your Time Machine backup is getting full, what it will do is it will start deleting some of the older files that it no longer needs to keep. Time machine knows what it needs to keep, and if you’ve thrown away a file, it will eventually delete it even in the backup. We do not want to use Time Machine as an archive; we only use it as a backup.

We also have different options here; this is where I can exclude different folders and hard drives from being backed up. I click on options, and you’re going to see I have my Drobo in here; this is why it is not backing up my Drobo. I can drag different hard drives and folders into this list. If I have a specific folder I do not want to backup, I can add it to this list. I can also click on the plus and minus to add different folders and external drives to my exclusion list. Then you can set if you want to be notified after old backups are deleted.

Remember how I said you do not want to use Time Machine as an archive because it will eventually delete your older backups. Your Time Machine hard drive, your external hard drive will run out of space in my case, my My Book Time Machine. When it runs out of space, what Time Machine will do is delete my older backups. If I want to be notified after it deletes those older backups, I will select this. I usually recommend leaving this off. I’m going to click on cancel.

One more option here, we have show Time Machine in the menu bar. I always turn this on. Why is that? Let’s take a look. I’m going to go on select this and I’m going to go and close this window. If we look up in my menu bar, we now have a menu extra for my Time Machine. This will allow me to see when the latest backup was, today it was at 7:55 AM. I can also backup the computer now. Now I know that I’ve created some files or made some major changes; I want to make sure that it is backed up. I select this, and it’ll back it up. I can also enter Time Machine. Again, we’ll talk about that in the next lesson. Then I can also open up my Time Machine preferences.

That’s how we use Time Machine to back up all of our data on our Mac.