Create a backup on a mac. How to create a Mac backup using Time Machine

No matter who you are, you should always back up your Mac. It's like life insurance except for your digital files. You never know when something might happen to your Mac, and you should always have a backup plan for emergencies; someone might spill a drink on your Mac, your HDD can fail, you can lose your Mac, and your Mac can even get a virus on rare occasions.

So, want to know how to back up your Mac? In this article, you will learn about the many ways and best ways to back up your Mac. We have 5 tips for you on how to back up Mac devices And we even have a bonus tip to make it easy to back up your Mac in just a few clicks.

Advice:

Article guide

Option 1: How to back up Mac using Time Machine

Connect an external storage device to your Mac.

When your Mac connects successfully, your Mac may be asked if you want to use Time Mac
Click "Use as spare disk".

If there is no warning, double check that the disc is formatted correctly.
- It must be Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

If the warning still does not appear, you should:

Open system settings
Select Time Machine
Select Backup Disk
Then select your storage device

Option 2: How to Back Up Mac via iCloud

Open System Preferences on your Mac
click on iCloud.
Sign in to iCloud.
Check the box next to iCloud.
Click on the Options box in the iCloud row.
Check the box next to the things you want to keep in iCloud

In addition, you can:

Click Finder, you will see ICloud Drive Folder in the panel on the left.
Move any folder on your Mac that isn't already in ICloud to your ICloud Drive .

Option 3: How to back up Mac using Dropbox

To come in
Download and install the software
Once the software is installed on your Mac, open Dropbox
The web interface will open and you can copy your files there.
Click on Upload Files or Upload Folder on the right
Find the folder you want to download.
Click on Select.
Wait for the download to finish

Alternatively, you can also

When DropBox is installed on your Mac, you will see the Dropbox tab under Favorites in the Finder. Just drag and drop something into this folder and it will be saved to Dropbox.

Option 4: How to Back Up Mac with Online Backup Service

Note that the process for backing up your Mac will vary depending on the service, but in general it will be something like this:

Register an account, possibly a subscription or advance payment
Install their software and start the installation process.
The process may start immediately, or you may need to initiate it yourself.
The process may take some time.
If you want the process to be faster, you can manipulate some of the settings or choose only what you want to back up.

Option 5: How to Back Up Mac by Cloning Your Mac

Please note that the process for cloning your Mac will differ depending on software but in general it will look like this:

As with Time Machine, you need to connect an external mass storage device to your Mac.

If you need to format external storage:
Open Disk Utility
Please select external drive
Click "Erase"
Format options
Select MacOS Extended (Journaled)
Click Erase again

Open your cloning software.
Find the option "Copy" to external drive.

** Make sure all necessary files are copied, otherwise your clone may not boot.

You may be prompted for a password to confirm the transfer
Wait for the end of the translation

Before backing up your Mac, you should make sure that there are no junk files on your Mac. You don't want to back up your Mac along with all the other files you don't need. Junk files can also be the reason why your Mac is running slowly. You can even back up your files due to a virus on your Mac, but if you back up your Mac along with the virus, you may have other problems. So before you even start backup Mac, make sure you are using clean up your Mac.

IMyMac's PowerMyMac is a powerful all-in-one tool with many features to clean up your Mac. It has built-in tools like performance monitor, memory extraction, app uninstallation, smart cleanup, and a cleanup module.

Of the many features on PowerMyMac A cleaner module, we will teach you how to use the System Junk utility to clean up junk files from your Mac. If you know how to use this tool, you will have an idea of how to use other tools as the steps for this tool are similar to other tools.

Run the program.
Using the main interface of the program, you should check your Mac's system status if everything is okay to avoid backing up the slow or infected version of your Mac.
Once you find that your Mac is fine, click the Cleaner button and you will see System Junk.
Click System Junk and the program will start scanning the system cache, application cache, and other system components on your Mac. In the left circle, you will see the progress of the scan.
After the scan is complete, you should review the scanned items in case you don't want to delete certain files. If necessary, you can also return to previous page to re-scan if you find some garbage is missing.
Click the Clean button to remove the system unnecessary files on your Mac. When prompted, you may also need to enter a password.
Press the confirm button after pressing the "Clear" button.
Let the cleaning process complete, but it may take a while.

Now that you know how to back up your Mac, just remember our bonus tip and don't forget to clean up your Mac before backing up your Mac. There are many ways to back up your Mac, but all of these options won't be enough unless you clean up your Mac before backing up your Mac. Use any of these options to back up your Mac, and don't forget to use before backing up your Mac.

If you are still not backing up Mac OS X on a regular basis, you should be prepared for the fact that one day all your data may be irretrievably lost. There is hardly a single user who would say that this is not a problem for him. Even if your Mac is full of simple garbage, it’s all the same dear garbage in the configuration you need, with which you have become a soul, and its loss will sadly affect your state of mind. This is why you can and should regularly back up your disk. And even if you use an excellent antivirus, constantly check how everything works, you can still miss the "X" moment.

What if everything has already happened - the system fell, burying everything that was so dear to you under the rubble? Probably, for a start, try to save as much as possible with the help of special utilities data recovery. But this does not guarantee you a full refund: at best, you will be able to revive only part of what was on the hard drive. And then it's worth introducing a new habit - regular system backups.

I think that the real paranoid always keep several backups of irreplaceable, critical files, and in different places. And that's right, because you never know when sclerosis will hit? But in fact, many do not even realize how conservative we are and how attached we are to our personal environment - our favorite system. And only having lost it, we begin to look for ways to prevent this from happening again. And there really are ways, and quite a lot. The most popular of these are Time Machine backups and Disk Utility tools.

Using Time Machine

So, if your Mac is running OS X 10.5 or more late version, then the easiest way to back up your hard drive is to use the built-in Time Machine utility, which in automatic mode creates backups of the system and all important files on an external hard drive or on the network. System files, digital photos, music, movies, documentation and more - all this will remain with Time Machine safe and sound. This utility allows you to truly "go back in time" to restore files in their original form at the moment when you need it.

Time setting Machine will not take much of your time. The utility dialog box appears as soon as the user connects the second drive to the Mac, you are politely asked if you want to use this tool for backups.

Your task is to answer “yes” by clicking on the “Use as Backup Disk” button. Basically, that's all. If suddenly your hard drive orders to live for a long time, you can now not only restore all files, but also complete configuration systems before the "accident".

Backups are stored for the last 24 hours, week, month until the disk becomes full. After creating the first backup, the program will save only those files that have changed. If you have files that you do not need to save, configure the program so that they are not backed up.

To do this, in the "System settings" of the program, click the "Options" button, and in the dialog box that appears, specify the files and folders that should not be copied. Time Machine can also be started manually. To do this, select "Create a backup now" in the Program Menu.

Restoring Time Machine backups is as easy as launching the program itself. To do this, click the Time Machine icon, opening a window in which you should select desired file using the timeline on the right. Be sure to make sure that this is indeed the version you were looking for using the “ quick view"(Select the file and press the space bar). Then just click the "Restore" button, and the required file will be automatically revived "from the ashes".

Naturally, the main advantage of Time Machine is the ability to restore the entire system in just one click. Booting Mac OS from boot disk, just click "Restore system from backup".

Using Disk Utility

A great alternative to backing up with Time Machine is to create a virtual disk image along with all your Mac OS X contents using Disk Utility. Disk Utility has a number of unique features such as access rights, Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) and Access Control List (ACL). With Disk Utility, you can back up to external hard a disk that has sufficient free space.

Backing up to an external hard drive using Disk Utility

1. Connect an external hard drive (FireWire or USB) with sufficient space to store your Macintosh HD backup;

4. On the left side of the panel, select the disk you want to back up;
5. Click the Verify Disk button, if you need to fix any errors, click the Repair Disk button;

6. Click the New Image button on the toolbar, give a name to the disk image, in addition, it will indicate the time of the copy and the name of the saved disk;

Note: For increased security, Disk Utility allows you to create an encrypted disk backup. From Encryption: From the pop-up menu, choose either 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption. When prompted, you will have to enter a password for encryption.

7. Click the Save button;
8. Enter the administrator name and password when (and if) required; will save about 1 GB / min depending on various factors;
9. After the copying process is complete, select the newly created disk image in the device's Images> Scan Image for Restore pane from the menu and enable full scan.
10. Close Disk Utility (by pressing Q) and the Mac OS X installer (again by pressing Q), restart your computer.

To restore a disk backup of your Mac OS X:

1. Connect the external drive containing the data backup;
2. Run the installation DVD;
3. Select a language and select Disk Utility from the Utilitie menu;
4. Select Mac disk The OS X you want to restore;
5. Click the Restore tab and drag the internal drive to the Destination: field;
6. Click the Image ... button next to the Source: field;
7. Go to the local folder where the backup copy of the disk you need is saved (on an external disk);
8. Click the Open button to continue, then click Restore;
9. Enter the name and password of the administrator; if you have encrypted backup images disk, enter the password specified when saving the encrypted disk image; data recovery takes different time depending on the size of the saved disk.

In this article, we have described only two of several possible ways Mac OS X backups and data recovery. If you know of other (better) ways to back up a disk, please share with us and other readers in the comments.

Latest version operating system Apple's OS X Mavericks is available for download today. In this article, we'll show you how to save your data, update your operating system, and prepare for latest version OS X.

Before you start, you need to make sure you have everything you need. To back up your data, you will need an external hard drive with at least the same amount of memory as your computer's hard drive (or Time capsule). You should also make sure your Mac can run Mavericks and make sure you have an iTunes account to purchase the upgrade.

Before installing the update, you must make sure that your device is compatible with Mavericks. Most of the information you need is on the About This Computer tab. To open it, click on the Apple icon in the upper left corner of the screen, then click the About This Computer button.

This window will allow you to see what operating system is installed on your computer, check if your software is up to date or not, find out how much memory your computer has, and also get serial number to find out what year it was purchased.

Since Mavericks is loaded through the store Mac App, you must make sure the version number is listed on the About This Mac page 10.6.8 or higher. If you don't have 10.6 (also known as Snow Leopard), you can buy it online. When you click on "Software Update", the system will check for an update for your machine. We strongly recommend that you make sure your software is up to date before installing the operating system. In addition, you must have at least 2 GB of RAM.

Here is a complete list of machines that are compatible with OS X Mavericks:

MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or early 2009 or newer)
iMac (mid 2007 or newer)
Mac Mini (Early 2009 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
Xserve (early 2009)
MacBook Pro(mid / late 2007 or newer)
MacBook Air(late 2008 or newer)

You can find out the exact year of production of your poppy by its serial number:

Data backup

If your machine supports Mavericks, we recommend that you back up your data before updating.

If you are already using Time Machine, it is very easy to check when your data was last backed up and restart it if necessary. Just click on the Time Machine icon to see when the backup was completed. If you need to make another copy, just click on the "Create a backup copy."

If you haven't done a Time Machine backup, let's discuss different methods reserve copying Mac using Time Machine. You have two options: using Time Capsule, or using third-party external hard drives.

1. Back up to Time Capsule. To set up your AirPort Time Capsule for backups, open System Preferences and click the Time Machine button. Then press the "Select Disk" button and select your Time Capsule from the list that appears.

2. Back up to an external hard drive. When connecting any external hard disk for the first time, a pop-up window will appear prompting you to use it for Time Machine.

Encrypting backups will allow you to encrypt a Time Machine backup using FileVault 2. It's up to you whether you want to encrypt the backup or not. This will give you additional level password protection to access the backup, but encrypting the data can slow down the backup process noticeably.

Click on "Use as backup drive" and choose an external hard drive to use with Time Machine. The first backup may take several hours, I would recommend doing it quickly so as not to interrupt the process. After the initial backup, Time Machine makes an hourly backup of only files that have changed while the drive is connected. If the drive is not connected when it is time to back up Time Machine will simply wait until the drive is connected again and continue to operate normally.

In addition to Time Machine backups, or instead of Time Machine backups, you can use online backups, although this can be much slower than using a local drive.
Installing Mavericks

Once yours has created all the backups, you are ready to download Mavericks from App Store... The download is free and takes about an hour, depending on your internet. Once it finishes downloading, the installer will automatically open and you will be prompted to start. Click the "Continue" button to install.

The first part of the installation process simply involves agreeing to Apple's terms of use. Click the "Agree" button to continue. If you later decide that you want to read (or reread) all of the terms, you can find them on the Apple website.

You need to confirm once again that you have read the terms and conditions.

Next, you will need to choose which drive you want to install OS X Mavericks on. For most, this should be your internal hard drive, which is often the only choice, but if you have multiple partitions hard drive or multiple hard drives in the machine, select the drive that the best way suits your needs.

In order to proceed with the installation, you need to enter the administrator password on your computer. Usually this password is different from your Apple ID. This password is used when you log into your computer and is sometimes needed to change settings. Not all users on a computer have a single administrator user, so it is important to make sure that you are logged into an administrator account. If you have more than one account on your computer, the administrator is usually the first user of the computer.

You are now ready to install.

After a few minutes, the computer will automatically restart and the installation will begin.

The computer will boot with a black screen, showing the current progress of the installation in a gray window. This usually takes about forty-four minutes, but sometimes it actually takes an hour and twenty minutes, depending on the speed of your car.

If the progress bar seems to be stuck at "Less than a minute to finish," Don't worry. This message is almost always wrong, and takes much longer than he says. Do not try to restart your computer during this step.

When the installation is complete, you will receive a message that the installation was successful. Your computer will restart one last time. You are currently running OS X Mavericks. After rebooting, there are a few additional steps you will need to follow to get back to using your Mac.

Even though the installation is complete, there are still a few things that the installer must do before you can continue using your Mac. This process takes a few minutes, but is much faster than the previous step.

If the installer detects that you have old incompatible versions of software on your computer, it warns you that these programs have been moved to the Incompatible Programs folder.

Click the Start Using Mac button to start using your machine. At this point, depending on the version of OS X that has been updated, you may have to take a few additional steps, such as signing in (or creating) an iCloud account, which is not very long and easy enough.

When you go to the desktop for the first time, two notifications will appear in the right upper corner screen. The former reports that your Mac will be optimized for use with the Mavericks, which will impact performance and time autonomous work until complete.

And the second will offer to get acquainted with the features of the new operating system.

Clicking on the Show button will take you to a page on Apple's website that details the changes to Mavericks. You can always find “What's New in OS X Mavericks” later by using the Help menu in the Finder. First option, " Help Center», You will be taken to the Mavericks User Guide. The second option, What's New in OS X Mavericks, takes you to Apple's page, which highlights some of the new features.

Congratulations! Your computer is now running OS X Mavericks. Over the next few days, we'll be posting several help articles to help you get the most out of your updated Mac.

And if your computer is outdated for Mavericks - it's time to upgrade! New MacBoo Pro, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina Display always available in our online store

Using macOS backup, you can avoid problems such as data loss due to drive failure or system problems that cannot be fixed.

Anything can happen - an unsuccessful system update, disk damage, software and system errors, or there will be a need for a pre-configured and saved system. V this manual you will learn how to create backup copies of macOS, protecting yourself from the loss of important data and other problems.

Backing up with Time Machine

To create a Time Machine backup, you need an external drive connected to your computer, such as a USB drive of sufficient capacity.

Time Machine automatically performs hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily, for a month, and every week for all the past months. As the disk fills up, the previously created copies will be overwritten.

Connect the external drive to your Mac, go to system preferences and open " Time machine".

Click " Select a backup disk".

Select an external drive, check the box " Encrypt copies"(to keep your backups safe) and click" Use disk".

Create a password that will be used to encrypt your drive.

Important ... If you forget your password, it will not be possible to restore your backups.

If the disc is not properly formatted, you will be prompted to erase it.

After that, Time Machine will periodically create backups of your system.

If you need to disable automatic backups, just uncheck the " Create backups automatically".

If necessary, you can start the backup manually by selecting " Back up now".

Also, view the status of the backup, stop the backup, enter Time Machine and open the settings.

ICloud backup

Open " System settings"and come in" iCloud".

Check the data you want to back up.

Do not forget to look at " Options".

Now you can protect your data from loss and restore it when needed.

It is easier to answer the question of how to make a backup on Mac OS X than to the question, why do you need a system backup at all. Although, why you need to make backups, it becomes obvious if you accidentally delete all your documents, photos and music with films a couple of times during the reinstallation of the system or damage the files of a project that you have been working on for a couple of months.

And if you know that everything can be fixed in ten minutes by connecting an external drive with a backup, then life becomes much easier. And in general, you feel much more confident when you know that you can always return important data.

And for creating backups in Mac OS X there is a built-in tool - Time Machine. When I started using it, I had a lot of questions, so I decided to collect the answers to them in one place, in this article.

How to make a backup on a Mac

In general, it's pretty simple: you just take an external hard drive, attach it to your Mac, and it should ask you if you want to use that drive for Time Machine backups.

An important tip to give here: do your first backup in the evening, because the first time the process can take overnight, especially if you have a lot of data on disk.

Time Machine FAQs

How does Time Machine work?

When Time Machine makes the first backup, it copies all data hard disk, except for the contents of the recycle bin and some system files. Then, on the disk where the backup is stored, a folder is created with the date of the backup in the name:

/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/ixrevo's Mac / 2013-05-28-010212 /

When creating subsequent backups, only those files are copied that have changed since the first backup was created, and for unchanged files, hard links are created to these files in previous backups. If none of the files in any directory has been changed, then a hard link is created only to this directory.

Thus, the backup in Time Machine is incremental, which means that during the creation of a new backup, only changed files are copied, which helps to significantly reduce the disk space required for storing the backup.

What do you need to start making backups in Time Machine?

Requires a Mac and an external hard drive or Time Capsule.

Airport Time Capsule is a Wi-Fi hotspot combined with a hard drive.

An external hard drive can have any interface (USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, eSATA), but the faster the better, of course, therefore, when choosing a drive for Time Machine, I settled on USB 3.0, because it gives advantages in compatibility due to for the widespread use of USB, as well as high speed the third version of this interface.

In this case, the external drive must be formatted to use one of the types file system... I myself, as advised by Apple, formatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

How much hard drive do you need for Time Machine?

The simple answer is 2TB will be enough, but 3TB is for sure. It depends on the amount of data on your Mac's disk and on how often this data changes (for example, editing several video projects of several gigabytes each can be attributed to frequent data changes). If you multiply the amount of data on your disk by 3, you get the minimum disk size needed for a backup.

If you have a 512 GB disk and 350 GB of them are occupied, then a 1 TB disk should be enough. But this is not an absolute minimum, because if you do not often change your data and you do not need to have backups for every day, then it is quite possible to get by with a factor of 1.5, that is, multiply the amount of data by 1.5 (350 GB x 1.5 = 525 GB). In any case, such a backup is much better than no backup at all.

For example, my MacBook has Pro disk by 751 GB, of which a little more than 300 GB is occupied by data.
For backups, I use a 2TB external drive, and the Time Machine backups are 450GB. I make backups several times a week.

What happens when Time Machine runs out of disk space?

It's very simple - Time Machine will start deleting the oldest backups.

What is the schedule for Time Machine to back up?

Time Machine creates a backup every hour if the backup disk is connected to the Mac. If the disk for backups is not connected, then when the function of creating local snapshots is enabled (on MacBooks it is enabled together with Time Machine), local backups are also created every hour.

You can start creating a backup copy manually, but besides this, you cannot change the schedule in any way and it is better not to try to do this by editing system files because if you break the backup, then it can have very sad consequences.

As the backups accumulate, Time Machine begins to "compress" them, leaving only:

hourly backups for the last 24 hours,
daily backups for the last month,
monthly backups for previous months, as long as free space permits.

What kind of data is backed up?

All data from all internal drives of your Mac computer that have any of the file system types. Therefore, for example, the Boot Camp partition, like any other Windows or Linux formatted partitions, will not be included in the backup. Also, data on external and network drives cannot be backed up.

Can a Time Machine drive be used to store something else?

Time Machine will not delete any other data that you put on the drive used for backup. Just keep in mind that storing important data on a disk used for backups can be dangerous if you do not back up this data elsewhere.

You also need to understand that the more disk space is used, the less space will be left for backups.

Can I use a Time Machine drive that already has other data on it?

If the disk has the correct partition formatting required by Time Machine, then this may well work. But I would suggest that you temporarily save the old data from the drive you want to use somewhere else, just in case.

Can I use a disk to back up multiple computers?

Yes, there are no restrictions here, except for one very important one: the amount of free disk space for backups. Each computer will require a certain amount of free space for backup, which we discussed a little earlier in the article.