Why (and How) I Still Use Time Machine to Back Up My Mac
Losing something you spent time working on or photos you can’t replace is devastating. You might think this is a problem of the past due to cloud storage services like Apple’s iCloud, but that’s not entirely true.
On the one hand, users are sometimes locked out of their cloud accounts, making it impossible to recover their files. On the other hand, not everything on your Mac is stored in iCloud. Things like settings, apps, and customizations aren’t easy to recover if something happens to your Mac. It’s also much faster to recover files from a local backup than from a cloud backup, which is important if you’re backing up things like videos or photo libraries. Finally, you get some peace of mind when you are in control of your backup, as opposed to having it in the hands of a company.
For these reasons, I recommend making a full local backup of your Mac. There are many ways to do this, including using third-party software. For most people, though, I recommend something that may seem old-fashioned: an external hard drive and Apple’s Time Machine.
Why Time Machine?
Time Machine is the easiest way for Mac users to have a local backup. There are other solutions, of course, and every power Mac user has their favorite. For the average user, however, it’s hard to beat Time Machine. It just comes with the operating system.
Simply plug in an empty external hard drive (one larger than your Mac’s internal drive) and head to System Settings > General > Time Machine. From there, you can start backing up with just a few clicks.
This backup includes everything on your disk. That means your documents, photos and videos, yes, but also everything else. Apps you have installed, including big games. Your settings, both for macOS and for each app you have installed. If it’s saved on your Mac, it’s backed up to Time Machine (unless you specifically tell the software not to include it).
There are all kinds of ways to recover your files from a Time Machine backup. If you’re setting up a new Mac, you have the option of using your backup to restore your files and settings. Or, if you don’t prefer, you can simply drag the files from the backup drive to your new Mac.
What do you think of it so far?
By default, Time Machine performs a new backup every hour. Only new files are copied, and versions of deleted files remain on the disk until the disk is full. Time Machine also allows you to browse past versions of the same file, if you want. You can customize the frequency of backups: all options are hourly, daily or weekly. Personally, I find all this excessive and I instead use a fourth option, manual. And a free app I found makes it transparent.
Credit: Justin Pot
My Mac is a laptop, which I often use away from my desk, so I can’t leave an external drive plugged in. I try to plug in my drive while I’m at my desk, but that means I end up accidentally unplugging my Time Machine drive without unmounting it. Do this enough times and you’ll end up with a corrupt drive (trust me, it’s happened several times).
That’s why I was happy to find Easy Backup and Eject, a free Mac app that runs in the background and does just one thing: start a Time Machine backup when you plug in your drive, and unmount the drive once the backup is complete.
With this software installed, I can plug in my drive every time I want to make a backup and stop thinking about it. Backups usually don’t take me more than a few minutes, so by the time I’m ready to leave my desk, I can just unplug everything and go about my business. It’s perfect. Give it a try if you like the idea of Time Machine but can’t keep a hard drive plugged in all the time.
