But there are situations where backing up certain files is unnecessary and will just eat up space.įor example, if you are temporarily storing large files on a drive before moving them somewhere else, you may not want them included in your hourly backups. Obviously you want your important data to be backed up regularly, and leaving Time Machine switched on and the drive connected is the most sensible way to achieve this. Namely, excluding some items from backups. With regular backups comes the probability that a drive will eventually fill up, but there are things you can do to prolong the amount of time before this happens. If your needs are more modest, LaCie makes a 500GB 2.5 inch drive for around £70.Īpple of course makes the Time Capsule, a combined 802.11n wireless base station and 1 or 2 terabyte hard drive specially designed to work with Time Machine and offering wireless backups, so you don't have to manually connect a drive to one or more Macs to back them up.Īlthough it's more expensive than a basic drive, it does offer various other advantages such as dual band Wi-Fi, guest networking, wireless drive sharing and wireless printer sharing.
Western Digital's 1TB My Book Essential can be picked up for around £75, and LaCie's 2TB Neil Poulton Design drive is around £150. The good news is that very large drives are now commonplace and so a 500GB, 750GB or even 1 terabyte external hard drive shouldn't break the bank. There's not much point in getting a backup drive that's the same size as your hard drive, as it will probably fill up quite quickly, especially if you regularly add or modify lots of large files. You can increase the backup interval and also force it to skip backups between specified times of day, but still leave it activated so you don't have to keep turning it on and off.
You might want to do this if you worry that an automatic backup starting up could interfere with your work or slow your Mac down.
If you prefer, you can alter this schedule with a free app called Time Machine Scheduler. For as long as the specified drive is connected and Time Machine is switched on, it will keep hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups for previous months. It makes sense to back up to an external FireWire or USB2 hard drive, as these are both surprisingly inexpensive and huge in size, though network drives and partitioned internal drives are also supported in some configurations. You can use Spotlight to preview an item to see if it's the one you want, and navigate back and forth through a folder's history. From there you can restore the file or delete it from the backup, if you wish. So, for example, if you have deleted or changed an item, you can go back to the last backup and locate it from the point before you changed it or, from the point before that, for as many backups as you have. By entering Time Machine's 'history' view, your Mac can display snapshots of every file and folder at every point it has been backed up. Time Machine would be merely a good solution if this was the whole story, but the reason it's special is that it lets you recover data in a really intuitive way. It also means you can rest assured that every new or modified file is being backed up, without you having to know what or where those files are. The great advantage of incremental backups is that they use far less space than just copying everything every time. It's able to determine this information thanks to some complex low-level technology using something called 'fsevents', though all most users need to know about this is that it works invisibly in the background.
It works by initially making a byte-forbyte copy of your system to a secondary or external hard drive, including not just all your data and applications but also the system itself.Įvery subsequent backup that you perform or that is done automatically is incremental, meaning Time Machine only backs up files that have been added or modified since the last backup. You'll find Time Machine in your Mac's System Preferences if you're running OS X 10.5 or 10.6, with a large, friendly on/off button to activate or deactivate it. There are no complicated options, no fiddling and best of all, it works automatically. It was a typically Apple-like approach to nudging users towards a certain way of working – in this case, backing up. With OS X 10.5, Apple introduced Time Machine, an outwardly simple and straightforward backup tool tightly integrated into the system.