Now I know as Mac user you run into the mentality that Macs “don’t get viruses” or “Macs rarely have issues”. Both of those statements are false. As a technician, I have seen viruses, adware and other forms of malware. I have also seen hard drives fail time and time again. This is not to discourage people from buying Macs. I’ve seen more malevolent malware and catastrophic failure when I was a PC tech, but these unfortunate events do happen in the Mac world. This is why backups are important, even on Macs. Luckily for Mac users, doing backups is so much easier thanks to Time Machine.
Introduced back in the Leopard days, Time Machine is Apple’s backup software and it is pretty darn good at doing its job of keeping your family photos, music, and even software from being completely lost in the void of corrupted bits and bytes.
With Time Machine you can store backups on your Mac’s hard drive, but I would recommend using a external hard drive. “What? I just spent a lot of money on this computer and now I have to buy something else?” That’s sometimes what I hear in response to my recommendation, but with data recovery costs ranging from $250 to thousands of dollars, $80 and twenty minutes of your time is far cheaper and simpler.
Check out the Wikipedia article on Time Machine.