Mac Tips & Lessons
-
macOS Classes5 Lessons
-
New in macOS Sequoia3 Lessons
-
Getting Started with the Mac13 Lessons
-
14+ Tips for Getting Started with a New Mac (and older Macs)
-
How to tell which macOS you are using
-
Getting Around your Mac
-
Working with Finder Windows
-
Accessing Folders and Navigating Folders
-
A Look a the Folder Hierarchy of the Mac
-
Using Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Notifications and the Notification Center
-
Searching with Spotlight Search
-
System Preferences Overview
-
Mac Quick Look Demystified: Preview Files with Ease!
-
Quickly access Mac system settings with Menu Bar or Dock
-
Learn Cut, Copy, and Paste on Mac
-
14+ Tips for Getting Started with a New Mac (and older Macs)
-
Menu Bar Lessons for the Mac4 Lessons
-
Dock Lessons for the Mac11 Lessons
-
Automatically Hide the Dock
-
Open Recent Documents from a Closed app with the Mac's Dock
-
Open an App's Recent Documents through the Dock on the Mac
-
Change the Position of the Dock
-
Working with Applications in the Dock
-
Documents and Folders in the Dock
-
Customizing the Dock
-
Add Printers to the Mac's Dock
-
3 Easy Tips for Organizing your Folders in the Mac's Dock
-
Unlock Hidden Settings for the Dock
-
How to Add Folders to the Mac Dock
-
Automatically Hide the Dock
-
Finder Lessons for the Mac24 Lessons
-
Opening an Enclosing Folder from a Finder Window
-
Adding a Folder to the Sidebar in a Finder Window
-
Cycle through your Open Finder Windows
-
Set What Folder A New Finder Windows Shows
-
Finder Window View Options
-
View Unopened Documents with Quick Look
-
Arranging Files and Folders
-
Actions and Tasks
-
Finder Windows as Tabs
-
Customizing the Sidebar
-
Customize the Finder Window Toolbar
-
Show the Path Bar in a Finder Window
-
Keep Folders on Top
-
Show the Status Bar in Finder Windows
-
Set what is searched in a Finder Window
-
Hide your Hard Drives from the Desktop
-
Add Documents to a Finder Window Toolbar
-
Resizing Finder Window Columns
-
Copy the location of a File or Folder as Pathname
-
Set what your Finder Windows Open To
-
Show the Mac's Clipboard in a Window
-
Create a PDF from Multiple Images with Quick Actions on the Mac
-
The ultimate guide to the Mac's Finder: 24+ tips included!
-
Need help Organizing Your Mac? Master Smart Folders Today!
-
Opening an Enclosing Folder from a Finder Window
-
Manage Applications on the Mac24 Lessons
-
Easily Open the Applications Folder
-
Apps and Significant Energy
-
Set which Applications Open at Login
-
Add the Applications Folder to the Dock
-
Close Windows when Quitting Apps
-
5 Ways to Find and Open your Applications on the Mac
-
Finding your Applications Folder
-
Switching between Open Applications
-
Hiding Open Applications
-
Launchpad and Applications
-
Opening Applications with Spotlight Search
-
Installing Applications
-
Removing or Uninstalling Applications
-
Applications in Full-screen Mode
-
Finding an App’s Preferences or Settings
-
Open Apps with the Launchpad Icon
-
Use Keyboard Shortcuts to Switch between Open Apps
-
Shrink Apps to Prevent the MacBook Pro Notch from Obscuring App Controls
-
Prevent In-App Rating & Review Notifications
-
How to Check App Version History on Your Mac
-
How to Use Multiple Desktops with Spaces
-
Switch between open apps with the Mac's App Switcher
-
Enhance your Mac experience by Installing iOS apps
-
Add a Signature to a Document
-
Easily Open the Applications Folder
-
Manage Files and Folders on the Mac30 Lessons
-
Selecting Documents and Folders
-
Working with Save Dialog Boxes
-
Deleting Files and Folders
-
Copying, Moving, and Grouping Files
-
Move Selected Files into a New Folder
-
Specifying Applications for Documents
-
4 Ways to Open a File on the Mac
-
3 Ways to Force Quit an App on the Mac
-
4 Ways to Edit Finder Window Sidebars on the Mac
-
Create A New Folder with Selected Files on the Mac
-
Using Spring-loaded Folders
-
Compressing Files and Folders
-
Convert and Compress Images with Quick Actions
-
Viewing Document Information
-
Renaming Files in Batches
-
Tagging Files and Folders
-
Set What App a Document Opens With
-
Open Windows Media or WMV Files
-
Tips for finding your Downloads Folder
-
See Folder Sizes in a Finder Window
-
Duplicate Documents with Stationery Pad on the Mac
-
Reverse the Print Order of your Document
-
Creating PDFs on a Mac: Two Easy Methods
-
Save Time and Effort: How to Select Multiple Files on Your Mac
-
How to Easily Zip and Unzip Files on Your Mac
-
Learn how to use Find and Replace on the Mac
-
Rename Multiple Files on the Mac
-
How to Manage Storage on Your Mac - Easy Tips & Tricks!
-
Ever Wondered How to Rename Mac Files? Top 7 Tips Here!
-
11 Easy Ways to Optimize Your Mac's Desktop Experience
-
Selecting Documents and Folders
-
General macOS Lessons21 Lessons|1 Quiz
-
Have your Mac Learn Spelling
-
Close Notifications with a Swipe
-
Working with the Today View
-
Using Siri
-
Using Mission Control
-
Add Virtual Desktops with Spaces on the Mac
-
Sharing Files with AirDrop
-
iCloud Options
-
Take a Screenshot of your Display
-
Add Emojis as Text
-
View All Open Windows as Thumbnails
-
Copy, and Paste and Match Style
-
Type Special Characters with the Keyboard Viewer
-
Set where Screenshots are Saved
-
Add a Timer to Screenshots
-
Hide all your open windows to show the Mac's Desktop
-
Turn on Do Not Disturb Temporarily
-
Using Split View
-
The Mac’s Magic Shortcut to Trashing Files and Photos Quickly
-
10 Little Known Tips for the Mac
-
Keyboard Navigation on the Mac
-
Have your Mac Learn Spelling
-
Preferences or Settings for the Mac34 Lessons
-
Organize and Hide System Preference Panes
-
General Preferences
-
Working with Printers and Scanners
-
Share Connected Printers with other Macs
-
A Quick look at Sound Preferences
-
A closer look at Internet Accounts
-
Creating User Accounts
-
Set an Animated Emoji for your Mac User Profile
-
Customize the Date and Time in the Mac's Menu Bar
-
Adding Parental Controls
-
Change the Cursor Size
-
Show the Date in the Menu bar
-
Change the Clock in the Menu Bar from Digital to Analog
-
Set the Scroll Bar to Always Show in a Window
-
Create a New user Account
-
Text Replacement
-
Quickly Look up Information with the Trackpad
-
Shortcuts for opening System Preference Panes
-
Rename your Mac
-
Searching your System Preferences
-
Set the Default Browser on the Mac
-
Reduce the Transparency in the Menu Bar and Dock
-
Open Preference Panes from the Dock
-
A closer look at Wi-fi Settings
-
Using Hot Corners
-
Select what macOS Updates you want to install
-
Create Keyboard Shortcuts for Menu Items
-
Use Keyboard Navigation to Move Focus
-
Enable Fast User Switching to Switch between User Accounts
-
Use Touch ID to Switch between Users on the Mac
-
How to Zoom into your Mac's Display for Easier Reading
-
How to Extend Your Mac Display to Your iPad
-
Disabling Showing the Notification Center from the Trackpad
-
Can Force Click Boost Your Productivity on your Mac? Find Out How!
-
Organize and Hide System Preference Panes
-
Troubleshooting Lessons for the Mac16 Lessons
-
Finding Help for your Mac
-
Backing Up with Time Machine
-
Restoring Files with Time Machine
-
Erase a Hard Drive
-
Force Quit an App on the Mac
-
Restart or Relaunch the Mac's Finder
-
Force Quit Apps from the Apple Menu
-
Putting it All Together
-
Automatically delete items in the Trash after 30 Days
-
Troubleshooting Bluetooth Connections
-
Manage Storage Space with macOS Monterey and Earlier
-
Reclaim Local Mac Storage Space by Removing iCloud Drive Downloads
-
Disable Unused Sharing Options on Your Mac If You’re Not Using Them
-
Forget Wi-Fi Networks that are Troublesome
-
View memory usage in Activity Monitor on Mac
-
Erase All Content and Settings on a Mac
-
Finding Help for your Mac
-
New in macOS Mojave12 Lessons
-
Dark Mode Appearance
-
Dynamic Desktop Pictures
-
View Recent Apps in the Dock
-
Gallery View for Files in Finder Windows
-
macOS Software Updates in System Preferences
-
Desktop Stacks for Files on the Desktop
-
Keep Desktop Folders on Top of Files
-
View File Metadata
-
Quick Actions and Markup Files
-
Continuity Camera from your iPhone or iPad
-
New Privacy Options
-
New Screenshot Options
-
Dark Mode Appearance
-
New in macOS Catalina19 Lessons
-
See which apps will no longer work with macOS Catalina
-
See which apps are 32-bit
-
Opening Recent Folders from the Dock
-
Reorganized System Preferences
-
New Window Management Options
-
New Screen Time Preferences
-
New Music App
-
New TV App
-
New Podcasts App
-
Manage your iOS Devices through the Finder
-
What's New in the Photos App
-
What's New in the Notes App
-
What's New in Safari
-
What's New in the Mail app
-
New FindMy App
-
New Catalyst Apps
-
New Security and Privacy Features
-
New Redesigned Reminders App
-
Use an iPad as a second Display with Sidecar
-
See which apps will no longer work with macOS Catalina
-
New in macOS Big Sur15 Lessons
-
What hasn't changed with macOS Big Sur
-
Notification Center
-
Allow Wallpaper Tinting in Windows
-
Filtering Mail Messages
-
New Control Center
-
A look at the Finder Window Toolbar
-
New with Desktop Pictures
-
Play Startup Sound
-
Drag and Drop Controls to the Menu Bar
-
Battery Usage Preferences
-
Change the Date & Time in the Menu Bar
-
Do Not Disturb location in macOS Big Sur
-
See what is Now Playing
-
It’s Time to Consider Upgrading to macOS 11 Big Sur
-
How to Reveal the Proxy Icon in Big Sur
-
What hasn't changed with macOS Big Sur
-
New & Updated in macOS Ventura12 Lessons
-
How to Manage your Open Windows with Stage Manager
-
New Setup Options and Filters in Focus on the Mac with macOS Ventura
-
View Forecasts and More in the New Weather App on the Mac
-
Add Multiple Stops to Routes in the Maps App with macOS Ventura
-
Create Templates for Reminders Lists with macOS Ventura
-
Maximizing Your Storage on macOS Ventura: A Guide to Managing Space
-
Discover the New Clock App on MacOS Ventura
-
How to Keep Scroll Bars Always Visible on Mac (macOS Ventura)
-
Manage App Store and Streaming Services Subscriptions through the Mac
-
Save time typing text and Emojis on your Mac with Text Replacement!
-
3 Ways to Remove the Background in a Photo
-
Stop Apps from Launching when your Mac Starts Up
-
How to Manage your Open Windows with Stage Manager
-
Favorite Features in macOS Sonoma9 Lessons
-
Make Your Favorite Websites Act Like Apps with macOS Sonoma
-
macOS Sonoma: Screensavers & Wallpapers
-
Click your Wallpaper to Show the Desktop
-
Add Widgets to your Mac's Desktop
-
My 3 Favorite New Features in Reminders with macOS Sonoma!
-
iCloud Passwords for Chrome: Seamless Access to Your Passwords
-
Make your next Zoom Presentation stand out with Presenter Overlays
-
Turn off Click Wallpaper to Show Desktop
-
Build your own Apple Passwords app in 5 minutes! A Step-by-Step Guide
-
Make Your Favorite Websites Act Like Apps with macOS Sonoma
-
New in macOS Monterey6 Lessons
Backing Up with Time Machine
Learn how to back up your Mac with Time Machine.
In this lesson for macOS, I show you how easy it is to back up your Mac with Time Machine. With Time Machine, your Mac, every file and folder on it, is backed up every hour as long as you hard drive you are using for Time Machine is plugged in to your Mac. Learn all about Time Machine and how important it is to back up your Mac in this lesson.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
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.