How to Set up and Use Time Machine to Backup your Mac 2020

with all of the different types of things that can happen to your computer it is important that you have regular file backups so today we're talking time machine [Music] everyone welcome back to another tech tip for those that are unaware Time Machine is a built-in backup software that comes pre-installed on a Mac OS device it'll go in it'll create hourly backups and make things really easy to revert back in case something happens so today we're going to go through show you some of the settings and show you some of the setups to get your time machine up and running now before we dive right in you will want to make sure that you have a empty external hard drive with nothing on it because time machine is going to format that drive in order to prepare it for the backup system so for today's demonstration I have a samsung portable SSD t5 this is a 500 gigabyte drive now although Time Machine is smart enough that when the drive becomes full it's automatically going to start deleting the oldest backups but of course the larger drive you have the further back your backups can go now to get started go ahead and plug in your hard drive to your machine now when you plug this in if this is the first time that you're plugging it into the computer you may get this prompt where it says do you want to use it's going to have your hard drive name to backup with Time Machine from here you're going to go ahead and click on use as a backup disk that's automatically going to open up Time Machine and then it's going to ask you if you want to erase if you didn't get that prompt to what you're going to want to do so we go up to spotlight and a search time machine you're going to want to select time machine under the system preferences option and that's going to open up the time machine program from here you then may get a prompt that says asking you if you do want to use the disk if you do great go ahead and click on use as a backup disk if you're still not getting it what you're gonna want to do is select where it says select backup disk and then you're gonna want to select the hard drive name or the drive name from the list and then once again click on use disk no matter which route it used in order to select the disk you're going to get this prompt where it says are you sure you want to erase the backup disk erasing will destroy all information on the disk and can't be undone so this is like I said earlier where you're gonna want to have an empty external drive with nothing on it because Time Machine has to prepare that drive and in doing so it's going to erase it so I'm going to go tap on erase and as you can see it's now erasing the disk and of course depending on the size of the disk is going to determine how long it's going to take to format now once time machine has completely formatted Drive it's going to give us some information right here in the center we've got the name of the drive how much space is available when the oldest backup took place when the latest backup took place and then of course since it did automatically check back up automatically it's showing us that our next backup is going to take place today at 12:17 p.m. if you don't want to have automatic backups you can come over here on the left-hand side and just uncheck that little checkbox right there moving on if we look a little bit below here time machine keeps local snapshots as space permits hourly backups for the past 24 hours daily backups for the past month weekly backups for all previous months and of course the oldest backups are deleted when the disk becomes full so the bigger the disk the more backups good you're gonna have but time machine is smart enough to delete the oldest backup when the disk becomes full if we go on into options here you do have the ability to exclude certain items from these backups because but I by default Time Machine backs up the entire computer personal files system preference file system files everything is currently backed up but you can go in and you can select the little plus right here and then you can navigate to maybe you have a specific program or maybe a folder of like video projects that you don't want to have backup just to save some space you can go in navigate to that folder and then click on exclude if you don't want to do that if you go down a little bit below here you can see backup while on battery power you can check that on or off depending on if you want backups to run while it's on battery power and then of course you can exclude system files and applications so if you just want to backup personal files but exclude system files that you can check that box as well for today's demo we're going to go ahead and just leave everything as default and click on safe and if you come down here where this little check box is where it says show time machine in menu bar you can check on that and you'll notice up in the menu bar here that you now have a time machine logo from here you can click on backup now enter time machine or open up time machine preferences so if you find yourself entering Time Machine frequently to do restorations or to do backups things like that you may want to check this box just to make it a little bit easier to access so if we go ahead and click on backup now you can see that it's going to start preparing backup and it's going to give us a progress bar now keep in mind the first are the initial backup for this is going to take the longest because it's more or less building a foundation for the backup and then once it's completed it's then going to just search for changes and backup those changes that will allow you to save some storage space and some time now moving on to the restore process if you ever need to restore from a time machine back up there are a few ways that you can do it however you will want to determine the level of restoration because this is going to impact which method you're going to use to restore from that time machine back up if you're looking to just restore a couple files that you may have accidentally deleted within the last 24 hours you can go on in to time machine thumb through the backups select the files that you delete it and then select restore if you're looking to restore more than just a few personal files but want to keep the system files intact plug in the drive that you use to create the back of the head on up to spotlight open up migrate assistant and follow the on-screen prompts and select from a Time Machine backup now of course if you're looking to do a full restore what you're going to want to do is power down the Machine and then plug in the drive that you use to create this time machine backups while you're powering on the Mac go ahead and hold command a plus the letter R until you see the logo or the spinning globe and then you can release this is going to launch you into the utility from then you can go ahead and choose a specific time machine backup to restore from and that is going to do it for today's tech tip thank you all so much for watching I really hope you enjoyed this video and you got something out of it if you did be sure to give the video a share and a big thumbs up hit that subscribe and ring the bell if you haven't already and we will see you on the next one peace lady [Music]

Channel: HelpCloud

Views: 307,590

Keywords: how to, tutorial, tech tip, my fast pc, myfastpc, mfpc, helpcloud, go-to tech resolution hub, time machine, macos backup, time machine backup, mac time machine, backup, apple time machine, how to use time machine, backup mac, restore mac, apple, how to backup mac, how to backup your mac, time machine mac, mac, hard drive, backup data, back up, macbook pro, imac, mac os, time machine explained, explain time machine

Id: l35C4a2IZUQ

Length: 6min 44sec (404 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020