Backing up your Mac is like flossing your teeth: everyone knows they should do it every night, but too many people never get around to it. Unlike flossing, once you set up backups, they don’t require daily attention. And turning on Apple’s Time Machine backup feature is easy—simply open System Preferences > Time Machine, click Select Backup Disk, and pick a hard drive to hold your backups. Still, it’s often overlooked until it’s too late.
There is one more piece to backing up, and one that is just as important as remembering to back up. You need to have an appropriate hard drive and there are tons of options. Choosing the wrong size drive or choosing one with the wrong connections are just some of the common mistakes made and often it means defeat. I have spoken to countless customers who took the right first step, they got a back up drive. But failed to follow through on the plan when they realized they made the wrong purchase and it’s surprising the number of folks who just put that incorrect drive in a drawer and never end up purchasing the correct one.
How Much Space Do You Need?
The first question when looking for a backup drive is how much data it needs to hold. You could put a lot of effort into figuring this out, but for most people, the answer simple. Buy the largest drive you can reasonably afford, as long as it will hold at least two to three times as much data as you have or anticipate creating in the near future. Say you use a MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD. You could get by with a 1 TB backup drive, which would be twice as large as your internal drive. But if a 1 TB drive costs $100 and a 2 TB drive costs $130, it’s worth the extra $30 to double the available space. It’s important to note that for time machine to work properly the hard drive must minimally be the same size as your computers internal hard drive, it does not matter if your using all of that drive space. If you have that 512gb SSD drive and an older 256GB drive kicking around it won’t work even if your only using 60GB on your computers drive. You can easily confirm the size drive you have in your machine by going to the Apple symbol located at the top left of your computer screen and then selecting about this mac. Regardless of your operating system this the basic path everyone can take.
How Will You Connect It to Your Mac?
With external hard drives, you need to match the ports on your Mac with the ports on the drive. That might sound tricky, what with USB 3, FireWire, USB-C, and Thunderbolt. Luckily, for most people, the right choice is simple: a drive that supports USB 3. They’re inexpensive, plenty fast for backups and even if you have an older machine it’s backwards compatible to USB 2.0.
Nearly every Mac sold since 2012 supports USB 3, either via the familiar USB-A port or the newer USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port. If your Mac has only USB-C ports—as would be the case if you have either a MacBook or a recent MacBook Pro—you may also need an adapter cable that’s USB-A on one end and USB-C on the other. We often recommend to customers a combination drive that can connect either via USB 3.0 or USB-C, this takes the worry out of taking home the wrong drive for most Macs in circulation today.
What Type of Drive Should You Buy?
Inside the case, an external hard drive contains either a 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drive mechanism.
- 2.5-inch drives are smaller, more portable, and usually bus-powered, meaning they get power from your computer instead of from a wall outlet, which makes them easier to hook up and use. They’re also designed to be more rugged.
- 3.5-inch drives usually need to be plugged into power, and they’re less appropriate to carry around. However, they cost less per gigabyte and can be bought easily in sizes up to 8 TB. If you work mostly on a notebook Mac and lead a mobile lifestyle, carrying a bus-powered 2.5-inch drive ensures you can back up while traveling. Such a drive might also be best for a MacBook-equipped college student.
Putting It All Together
Since the hard drive mechanisms are made by a relatively small number companies, the differences between external drives mostly come down to the price, industrial design, and extra ports. We’ve generally had good luck with drives from Lacie, Seagate and Western Digital.
If you are not sure what is the right drive for you and your computer send us an e-mail to sales@smalldog.com or stop into one of our stores. We will gladly help you find the drive that’s right for you and more many, that means a drive that is less than $100.