A lot of people are will be getting new Macs this year, and I’m hoping all of them will also be buying external hard drives for backups. The most common failure we see in our service centers are failed or failing hard drives. I’d say that perhaps half of all people who come in with these bad drives don’t have backups or haven’t backed up in months.
If you’re new to the Mac or new to Leopard (10.5), Snow Leopard (10.6) or the current Mac OS, Lion (10.7), there is backup software called Time Machine built right in. It’s easy to format an external drive to work with your Mac and Time Machine.
To do so, you’ll need to use Disk Utility to properly partition your drive. To find Disk Utility, either navigate to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility go to Spotlight (the magnifying glass icon) in the top righthand corner of your screen. Type “Disk Utility” in the search box dropdown, and then select it from the list.
Once in Disk Utility, you’ll see your external hard drive listed on the lefthand side of the window. (Unless you haven’t unboxed it and/or plugged it in yet—if you haven’t, I’ll wait. Ready? OK.)
Click on your hard drive’s icon and you’ll see a tab for Partition on the righthand side of that window. Click it. Choose one partition from Partition Layout. Name it what you want under Partition Information. Make sure the Format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).” Then click Apply. Give it a bit to process and you’re done.
To view and set up the drive in Time Machine, go to the Apple in the top left corner of the screen and choose System Preferences > Time Machine. On the righthand side of the window, there is a button that says “Select Disk.” Click that and choose your hard drive from the list. Make sure Time Machine is on and your computer will handle it form there. As long as that drive is plugged in and mounted, you’ll get hourly backups.
If you’re running on a laptop and don’t want the drive always connected, Time Machine will pick up where it left off the next time you plug it in, though it may not start immediately. You can force backups by going to the Time Machine icon on the top right of your screen and clicking “Back Up Now.”
Some tips for first time users: 1) Don’t interrupt your first backup, and 2) Expect it to take awhile if you have a large amount of data. (My first 500+GB backup took about 8 hours!)
This is something we mention a lot in Tech Tails, but I’m going to do it again: If you’re not backing up, please make it your new year’s resolution to do so. If you lose your data to a failing drive, it is extremely expensive to recover that data. A backup drive may cost you under $200; data recovery can cost you over $1,000.