Backing up your data is something we talk about with customers all the time but I am still amazed at the number of people that do not have backups of their critical data, photos and music. Hard drives fail. It is a simple fact that a mechanical device that may be spinning at 10,000 rpm has a number of failure modes that could cause data loss. Even if you have a solid state drive without spinning components your drive can fail. SSD drives still have components that fail such as transistors and capacitors. Wear and tear also occurs with SSD drives. The processor must read, modify, erase and write data and eventually even memory cells wear out. Your SSD drive is not an excuse to skip back-ups!
Apple makes backing up easy and automatic with Time Machine. It keeps a copy of all your files and remembers just what it looked like on any given day so you can go back in time and grab that picture you accidentally deleted. Grabbing a single file or folder is one use but Time Machine saved my bacon once when my Mac was stolen out of my hotel room while on vacation. The hotel compensated me for my loss but I would have lost all my precious data if I hadn’t had a Time Machine backup. Fortunately, I had learned that lesson the hard way years ago, so I got my replacement Mac, connected it to my Time Machine backup and I was back in business and only lost a couple photos from that vacation.
You can use Time Machine with an external drive connected to your USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt port on your Mac, with an external drive connected to the USB port of an AirPort Extreme or with an AirPort Time Capsule. Do not, as one customer was doing, use the same drive as your boot drive to store your backups!
Time Machine will keep hourly backups for the past day, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups. The oldest backups are deleted as your backup drive becomes full. With the low price of terabyte drives, get a big one! Setting up a fresh new hard drive for use with Time Machine is really simple. Plug it in. Really, that is pretty much all you have to do as Mac OS X will ask you when in senses a new drive whether you want to use that drive for Time Machine backup. You will have the option to encrypt the backup disk if you wish. If you select this option you will need to remember your password for sure!
If you are using an Apple Time Capsule or a drive connected to your AirPort Extreme you will open the Time Machine System Preference and specify that disk for backups. The Time Machine preference screen will also allow you to select the option to “Show Time Machine in menu bar”. If you select this you will have easy access to Time Machine status of your backups. The “Options” button will allow you to exclude items from backup if you are concerned about space. It also will toggle whether your Mac will backup while on battery power and notifications when backups are deleted as your drive fills.
Your first backup will take a while because it is copying everything. If you are using a Time Capsule, I do recommend that you connect an ethernet cable from the Time Capsule to your Mac to speed up that first backup. Once your first backup is complete, Time Machine automatically backs up only files that have changed since the last backup.
To find that homework you deleted just enter Time Machine from the Finder and go back in time to find the file. You can use the timeline on the right side of the window to reach a certain time. If you don’t know exactly when you deleted it you can use the back arrow to go back in time to show you when that folder last changed. You can search for a file using the Finder window in Time Machine, too. That is why it is always important to enter Time Machine from the Finder, not from an app or other location.
To restore a file you select the file from way back when and simply hit the “restore” button. If you run into a problem like mine where you need to restore your entire Mac you can use the Migration Assistant to specify a restore from a Time Machine backup.