How to Back Up Your Mac with Time Machine

If your Mac was lost, stolen or stopped working tomorrow, would you lose your photos and documents? Time Machine is Apple's free, built-in backup tool. Once it's set up, it backs up your whole Mac automatically.

• An external drive. A USB or Thunderbolt hard drive or SSD works well. Aim for at least twice the size of your Mac's storage. For a 512GB Mac, a 1TB or 2TB drive is ideal.
• Or a network drive that supports Time Machine, such as some NAS devices.

⚠️ The drive will be erased and formatted for Time Machine, so use an empty drive or copy off anything you need first.

1. Plug the drive into your Mac.
2. Your Mac may ask "Do you want to use [drive] to back up with Time Machine?" If it does, click Use as Backup Disk and skip to step 5.
3. If not, open System Settings > General > Time Machine.
4. Click Add Backup Disk… (or the + button), choose your drive and click Set Up Disk….
5. Choose whether to encrypt the backup (recommended, especially for a laptop drive). Write your password down somewhere safe. You can't restore without it.
6. Click Done. The first backup starts shortly.

The first backup can take several hours. After that, backups are quick because only changes are saved.

While the drive is connected, Time Machine automatically keeps:

• hourly backups for the past 24 hours
• daily backups for the past month
• weekly backups for all previous months

When the drive fills up, the oldest backups are deleted to make room.

Laptop users: just plug the drive in regularly (say, once a week) and Time Machine catches up by itself.

To start a backup straight away, click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar (a clock with an arrow) and choose Back Up Now.

If you can't see the icon, go to System Settings > Control Centre and set Time Machine to Show in Menu Bar.

1. Open the folder where the file used to be (for example, Documents).
2. Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and choose Browse Time Machine Backups.
3. Use the timeline on the right, or the arrows, to go back in time.
4. Select the file you want and click Restore.

Time Machine puts the file back where it was.

Setting up a new or repaired Mac? Use Migration Assistant:

1. On the new Mac, open Migration Assistant (in Applications > Utilities), or choose to transfer information during setup.
2. Choose From a Mac, Time Machine backup or startup disk.
3. Select your Time Machine drive and the backup you want.
4. Choose what to transfer: apps, user accounts, files and settings.

• Eject the drive properly before unplugging it. Right-click it on the Desktop and choose Eject.
• Check it's working now and then. The Time Machine settings page shows the date of your latest backup.
• Keep a second copy. Time Machine protects against mistakes and hardware failure. An extra copy in iCloud or kept at another location protects against theft, fire and flood too.

Five minutes of setup today could save years of photos and documents. Plug in a drive, turn on Time Machine, and let it get on with it.