Got a Mac? Backup with Time Machine. You Have No Excuse!

If you are not backing up the files on your computer, you are tempting fate. Hard drives fail all the time — do you want to lose all of your documents, pictures, movies, music, and work materials? External hard drives are extremely cheap, and Apple’s Time Machine backup feature requires little more than for you to plug one into your Mac.

What is Time Machine?

Time Machine is a data backup feature introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Time Machine takes all of the files on your computer, and backs them up to an external hard drive. If your computer’s hard drive crashes, or you accidentally delete important files, you can recover the information with Time Machine. If you are interested in the details of this backup procedure, OZaC has written an article on how Time Machine works.

What you need

You need two things to take advantage of Time Machine:

1. A Mac with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
2. An external hard drive.

Time Machine was introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and therefore is not present in Cheetah/Puma, Jaguar, Panther, nor Tiger. 10.5 Leopard is also the latest version of Mac OS X as of this writing.

External hard drives are pretty cheap. You can find them at most local electronics or office supply stores, or you can pick one up at Amazon.com. Two of the most common names in external hard drives are Western Digital and Seagate — I use a 500 GB Western Digital MyBook, and have also used a Seagate FreeAgent drive.

How to set up Time Machine

Setting up Time Machine is as easy as plugging in your external hard drive. Really… just plug your external hard drive into your Mac. The Time Machine window will pop up — make sure Time Machine’s status is set to “On”, and select the external hard drive to use as your backup drive. You can do this by pressing the “Choose Backup Disk” button.

How backups work

Once Time Machine has been set up to work with your external hard drive, it will take care of everything on its own. Time Machine will silently create backups throughout the day. If you need to unplug the external drive — perhaps you are traveling with your laptop for the day — Time Machine will resume backups when you reconnect the drive later.

Time Machine makes incremental backups. This means that Time Machine remembers the changes you make to your files, and keeps backups of each version. If you suddenly realize that the edits you made to a document yesterday were wrong, you can use Time Machine to retrieve a version of that document from before those edits were made.