- Time Machine Backup External Drive
- External Hard Drives For Pc
- Create Time Machine Backup On External Hard Drive
Use Time Machine with an external drive, such as Seagate® Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive, to easily back up your data, photos, and documents. Time Machine can automatically back up everything on your computer in just a few steps. Follow these steps to use your Backup Plus with Time Machine: 1. Plug in your Backup Plus to your system. Connect the drive to your Mac, and then open up Time Machine Preferences / Options. By default the drive will appear as an Excluded item Click on the name of the drive to highlight it, then click the - (minus) button at the bottom of the Excluded list Click Save and close the windows. Your new drive will be wiped and formatted to be compatible with Time Machine backups. Open up your Apple Menu (the cute little apple at the top left of your screen). Then select System Preferences.
Time Machine is a free built-in backup software which copies Mac disk contents to external storage. When it runs first, the Time Machine makes a full backup and performs incremental backups after that. After the backup was done it is possible to restore individual files, applications or entire storage to a previous version. I have time machine configured to backup from my mac then under options i saw the seagate drive showing as excluded. I removed it from excluded drives and hit save. However i don't think during the backup it actually saved these files because the time capsule still shows as having a lot of space available.
The hard disk where you store Time Machine may be full or it may be old. So its failure will lead to the loss of all backups of your system. In any case, you will have to transfer Time Machine files from one hard drive to another.
Good news! It’s pretty simple. It is only necessary to correctly format the new hard disk and set a new path for saving backup files.
Single External Hard Drive for Time Machine Backups
- Go to System Preferences -> Time Machine;
- Remove the check mark next to the line “Back Up Automatically”;
Time Machine Backup External Drive
- Next connect a new hard drive;
- Most likely, it is incorrectly formatted, so we run Disk Utility;
- Select the hard disk in the left column and click Erase;
- Select the formatting “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”;
- Click Erase. Warning: All media data will be deleted from this hard drive!
- When the disk is ready, go back to the System Preferences -> Time Machine;
- Choose Select Backup Disk and then click on your External HDD in a list;
- You will be asked if you want to change the hard drive or use both. Click “Use Disk”, unless you need for any reason to use both backups;
- Then we return a tick for the line “Back Up Automatically” and you can start.
Conclusion
In general, this is quite simple: you need to take an external hard drive, attach it to your Mac, and he should ask himself if you want to use this drive to backup Time Machine.
Read more:How to Check Hard Drive Health in macOS?
Important advice: make the first backup in the evening, because for the first time, the process can take all night, especially if you have a lot of data on the disk.
If you read my previous post about how to format an external drive for Mac, you know that I bought a 2TB Seagate Expansion external hard drive and managed to create two partitions on the disk — one for Mac backup purposes, and the other for personal use.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to back up your Mac data to an external drive. You should back up your Mac on a regular basis, especially if you’re planning to perform macOS updates.
I did this several weeks ago while preparing my MacBook Pro for a system update. You may also be interested in taking a look at the macOS Catalina slow issues we encountered during that process just in case you also want to upgrade your Mac to the latest operating system.
Please note that the backup tool that I used is Time Machine, a built-in app provided by Apple. If you want to back up your Mac data without using Time Machine, there are also other third-party Mac backup software worth considering.
Where is Time Machine on Mac?
External Hard Drives For Pc
Time Machine is a built-in app within macOS ever since OS X 10.5. To find it, click on the Apple logo on the top left corner of your screen, then select System Preferences.
In the Preferences Pane, you’ll see the app located between “Date & Time” and “Accessibility”.
What does Time Machine Backup?
Time Machine is the easiest way to back up Mac. And the app is created and recommended by Apple. Once you have a timely backup, it’s incredibly easy to restore all or part of your data in case of accidental deletion or a hard drive crash.
So, what kind of data does Time Machine backup? Everything!
Photos, videos, documents, applications, system files, accounts, preferences, messages, you name it. They all can be backed up by Time Machine. You can then restore your data from a Time Machine snapshot. To do so, first open Finder, then Applications, and click on Time Machine to continue.
Be aware that the recovery process can be only be conducted when your Mac can start up normally.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Backing up Mac to an External Hard Drive
Upgrade my windows media player. Note: the screenshots below are taken based on an older macOS. If your Mac is running Mojave or Catalina, they will look slightly different but the process should be similar.
Create Time Machine Backup On External Hard Drive
Step 1: Connect your external hard drive.
First, use the USB cable (or USB-C cable if you’re on the newest Mac model with Thunderbolt 3 ports) that comes with your external drive to connect that drive to your Mac.
Once the disk icon shows up on your desktop (if it doesn’t, open Finder > Preferences > General, and here make sure you’ve checked “External disks” to let them show on the desktop), move on to Step 2.
Note: if your external drive can’t show up on Mac or macOS hints the drive is not supported, you’ll have to re-format it to a Mac-compatible file system before continuing the following steps.
Step 2: Select the disk for backup.
Now open Time Machine (I tell you how above) and select the disk you want to use. I have partitioned my Seagate drive into two new volumes, “Backup” and “Personal Use”, as you see from the screenshot. I chose “Backup”.
Step 3: Confirm backup (optional).
If you have used another disk for backup before, Time Machine will ask you whether you want to stop backing up to the previous disk and use the new one instead. It’s up to you. I selected “Replace”.
Step 4: Wait until the process is complete.
Now Time Machine will start to backup all your data. The progress bar gives you an estimate of how much time is left before the backup is complete. I found it a bit inaccurate: Initially, it said “About 5 hours remaining”, but it only took two hours to finish. It’s worth noting that the remaining time may vary from case to case depending on the write speed of your external hard drive.
After about an hour and a half, it says only 15 minutes remaining
Step 5: Eject your external drive and unplug it.
When the backup procedure is completed, don’t rush to disconnect your device as this could cause potential disk problems. Instead, go back to the main desktop, locate the volume that your external hard drive represents, right-click and select Eject. Then, you can safely unplug the device and put it in a safe place. Extract rar file in windows 10.
Final Words
Like any other hardware device, an external hard drive will fail sooner or later. It’s best to make a copy of the data on your external drive — as they say, a “backup of your backups”!
One good option is to use cloud storage services like iDrive which I’ve been using and I really like the app because it’s super easy to use, and it also allows me to download Facebook photos automatically. Backblaze and Carbonite are also popular options in the market, though I am yet to give them a try.
I hope you find this tutorial helpful. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of data backup these days, especially when my mid-2012 MacBook hard drive died all of a sudden. I’ve also seen cases where my friend’s computer and hard drive failed. You can imagine their desperation. Without a proper backup, it’s really hard to restore data. Although you could try a third-party data recovery program, chances are they won’t get all your lost data back.
Anyway, the main takeaway I want you to have from this article is this: back up your Mac with Time Machine or another app, and create a second or third copy of those backups if you can.