For example, if your Mac has 512GB of storage, you'll want a 1TB drive. Once the backup drive is full, it will make room by deleting the oldest backups.Īs far as how big of a drive to get, the rule of thumb is 1.5 to 2 times the size of your Mac's hard drive. Once Time Machine is set up, it will create and store one backup every hour for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and one backup a week for all previous months until it runs out of space.

In fact, when you connect an external hard drive or SSD to your Mac, you may see a prompt asking if you want to use the drive with Time Machine. You don't have to do a thing after the initial setup process, which takes just a few minutes.īelow I'll walk you through using Time Machine, cover how to check what iCloud is keeping a backup of and for those who want some extra assurance, how to back up your Music library.Īs long as it knows where to store the files, Time Machine can be set to periodically backup your computer, though you can also manually trigger a backup.

For example, they don't remember the local coffee shop's complicated Wi-Fi password or every setting you've changed that's finally made booting your Mac feel as familiar as sinking into a comfy couch.Īpple makes backing up relatively painless by including its Time Machine app in the Mac operating system, which you can schedule to run a full backup of your Mac. But cloud drives can't back up everything on your computer. With so many cloud storage services available that can automatically sync your files, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, it's easy to just set it and forget it. A backup also makes it easy to move your apps and data to a new Mac if you upgrade to a new machine, like the newly announced Mac Studio desktop or the rumored M2 MacBook Pro. But if your MacBook or iMac crashes at an inopportune time - as computers always seem to do - you'll be infinitely grateful you took a few minutes to save all your important files. Backing up your Mac is one of those routine tasks that can wind up buried beneath the more urgent priorities on your to-do list.

Format external hard drive time machine