Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to answer some of the most
frequently asked questions about Time Machine. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a community
of supporters. Join us and get exclusive content at macmost.com/patreon. So Time Machine is something we should all
be using to back up our Macs. But you may have some questions about why
and how it works. So first should you be using Time machine
to back up your Mac? The answer is definitely YES. Hard drives fail. Computers fail. Computers are stolen. Disasters happen. Having a back up of your data is very important. But what if you're using iCloud. I often hear people say, well I'm backing
up to iCloud so I don't need Time Machine. If you use iCloud to store all of your documents,
all of your photos then it is true you do have copies of that on Apple servers. But it's still useful to have a Time Machine
back up to have that stuff backed up to another drive locally. Drives are cheap. So why not have an extra back up of your data. Plus, Time Machine allows you to go back and
look at older versions of your files. It's very important if you made a change that
you regret or if you deleted a file and now you want it back. So Time Machine backs up your entire drive. Everything. System files, library files, things like fonts
and all sorts of settings and preferences. In fact if your drive fails or if your computer
is stolen you can recreate everything on your computer by restoring from a Time Machine
back up. So what sort of drive do you need? Well, there are two ways to back up using
Time Machine. One is with the drive directly connected to
your Mac. You can do that with a desktop computer like
an iMac or if you have a MacBook but it mostly sits on your desk and doesn't move around. In that case any USB3 drive will work. You can find a ton of them, and they're really
cheap, if you look online at sites or go to a local computer store. Now if you're backing up a MacBook that moves
around a lot and is rarely sitting on a desk, so you don't want to plug in an external drive
all the time, you can connect an external drive to most wi-fi routers. They'll have a USB port, you can plug it in,
and then you can access that drive as a network drive. You can choose that as your back up drive. What size drive do you need? Well, a general rule of thumb is to make it
at least twice the size of the data you're backing up. So if you have a terabyte drive on your iMac
and you're using most of it you should have a 2 terabyte drive, at least. I would say that at minimum have a 1 terabyte
drive. So even if you have a 250G drive and you're
not using a lot of it, drives are cheap, so why not get a terabyte drive and back it up. The larger the drive you've got, the more
of a history will be kept. So not only will you have every file on your
Mac now but you'll also have a history of changes to files and files you deleted going
back months and even years. So formatting a Time Machine drive isn't really
something you need to worry about. It's automatically formatted when you choose
it to be your Time Machine drive. It's formatted using the old Apple file system
which is all that Time Machine works with right now. So I get this question a lot. Should I buy a SSD or an old fashioned spinning
hard drive? Most of the time a back up is just writing
out the back up files to the drive. Speed really doesn't matter. So getting a SSD is a waste of money. In fact if you're connecting to it using USB
you're not even using the SSD at its full speed. The bottleneck is in the cable not in the
drive speed. So getting a hard drive for a back up is perfectly
fine. So as you make changes to files and delete
files and replace them with others what happens when it fills up? All it's going to do is start deleting older
versions files. Time Machine is always going to keep around
all the files you have currently on your drive so you have a complete back up for a restore. It's going to keep as many old versions and
old files that have been deleted around as it can. So it's common to actually back up more than
one computer to a drive when you have a house of MacBooks. You've got a drive connected to your network
drive and you're using that same drive to back up two, three, or four MacBooks in your
house. That's normal. In that case you want to make sure that drive
is big enough to handle all of that. But otherwise if it's a drive connected directly
to your Mac you should have one for each Mac. That way you don't have to disconnect it and
move it around. Drives are cheap so why not have a back up
drive for every desktop computer. Now, this is a big mistake I see people make
all the time. They get this nice new external drive, maybe
they've never had an external drive before, and they think, ooh, I can put other things
on it as well. Drives are cheap. You should only use your Time Machine back
up drive for Time Machine backups. In fact putting other files on it will sometimes
mess up Time Machine which is trying to manage the files on that drive moving older versions
and older files to make room for newer ones. If you're always putting new things on it
or changing things on the drive it could lead to issues. So get another external drive if you want
to have an archive drive or something like that. But how about the opposite. How about having more than one back up. You can do this. You can actually plug in a second drive and
assign that as a Time Machine back up drive as well. This is commonly done in situations where
you're moving the Mac around. Like if you take a MacBook between home and
work you can have a Time Machine back up in either one. So setting up Time Machine is pretty easy. As a matter of fact if you don't have Time
Machine setup and you buy an external drive and you plug it in Mac OS will prompt you
asking if you want to use this drive as a Time Machine drive and then everything just
gets set up automatically. But otherwise you can go into System Preferences,
Time Machine and then you can select that disk as a drive and everything else is pretty
automatic. Time Machine backs up things hourly. A common question is people say well can I
have it do it less? The answer is you really don't want it to. Because if you have it do it less that means
it's going to be doing more work with each back up. An hourly back up is only going to back up
things that have changed. It's an incremental back up. So it should be fairly quick. Now there is a way to exclude things from
your back up. You can go into Time Machine, Preferences,
you can click Options, and there you can add exclusions. This is useful in cases where you have things
you know you don't want to back up. So what if you have an external drive that
has some data on it and you want that backed up as well. Well Time Machine can back up external drives
attached to your Mac. What you want to do is go into those exclusions
and make sure the external drive isn't listed there. By default it will probably be added to that
list. So you simply remove it from the exclusions
and now Time Machine will back up your internal drive and that external drive as well. So Time Machine isn't just for a disaster
like if your computer is stolen or the hard drive fails. It could also be used to turn back time when
you've made a mistake. For instance what if you accidentally delete
a file or a folder full of files and you realize it a week later. You can use Time Machine to get those back. You can even use Time Machine to get back
files that you've changed. So, for instance, you're working with a PhotoShop
document. You make some changes to it and you realize
I really want to go back to how the file was yesterday. You can use Time Machine to grab that old
version of the file. So restoring a file from Time Machine is a
little weird. What you want to do is go to the location
of that file. Then activate Time Machine and it will give
you this view of the folder that allows you to go back in time. Select the file and then hit Restore to restore
a copy of that file. You can have it Replace the current file or
have it appear as a New File. If you have any other questions about Time
Machine be sure to ask them in the Comments.
