How to Back Up and Restore Files on Mac with Time Machine

If your Mac data is everything for you, then you have to keep it safe with backups. Yes, data backups must be an essential part of your life if your professional life is on your laptop. Because once your hard drive dies, all the data will be lost and things will start going wrong.

For Windows users, there are many options for backing up their data like Windows File History. But, the Apple Mac users have a more powerful tool for backing up their important data which is named as Time Machine. Before going further, let’s take a look at What is a Time Machine.

So, according to Wikipedia: Time Machine is a backup software application distributed with the Apple macOS computer operating system. The software is designed to work with the Time Capsule storage product, as well as other internal and external disk drives.

Backing Up your Mac data with Time Machine is a nice move because it keeps a copy of everything on your Mac. It makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for each month.

How to Backup Files with MAC Time Machine

Now, let’s start with the tutorial for Backing Up your data with Time Machine. To use Time Machine very effectively, the most famous and preferable way is to use an external drive to your Mac. Follow these easy steps to create a Backup.

Step 1: The first step is to connect your external hard drive with your Mac Laptop or PC.

Step 2: After connecting the hard drive, you will be asked to configure it as a Time Machine drive, click “Use as Backup Disk” if you want to back up your data. Also, check the “Encrypt Backup Disk” option if you want to secure your backup disks with encryption. Check the image below for your reference.

Step 3: The back up of your Mac will be started. If you want to see the progress, you can check it out by going to System Preferences > Time Machine. The screen will look like the image below after going to the time machine for checking the status of your backup.

Step 4: If you want to get the status of your backup process on your menu bar, you can do it by enabling the “Show Time Machine in menu bar” on the same screen. After enabling this option, your backup status will look like the image shown below.

Now, your data backup is now done. Using an external hard disk is the simplest way of taking backup from Mac. But, there is yet another way of doing this with the use of the all-new Apple Airport Time Capsule. This device is the combination of router and storage device that makes backing up easy.

After installing and using Time Machine for your Mac data backup, it will also enable on more feature named as “Local Snapshots“. With this function enabled on your PC, it will take one daily snapshot and save it in every 24 hours,  beginning from the time you start or restart your computer. Also, one weekly snapshot is saved every week. These snapshots will only exist if you have set up Time Machine to back up to a separate drive.

If you have lots of scrap on your Mac and don’t want to backup all the files, there is also a provision with this Time Machine tool to exclude the unwanted files and folders which you don’t want to take the backup. For this, you have to click on the Options Button on the tool and after that click on Exclude Certain Folders. From there, you can exclude the folders which you don’t want to take the backup.

This function will also save the space on your Time Machine tool.

If we talk about the time taken by this tool to back up all the data, for the time it will take a long time because it has to back up all your files and folders available on the PC. But after the first backup, this process will not take much time because then it will only back up the modified and new files only. You can also choose the type of backup you want, whether automatic or manually. In the Automatic backup, whenever you connect the drive to your Mac, it will take the hourly backup itself.

How to Restore Files and Folders from the Backup

After Backing Up all your data, if unfortunately your PC get restored or formatted, the next important thing is to Restore all the Files and Folders which are important to you. For doing this, I will give you step by step details to restore the desired data from the recent backup created.

Step 1: Open the Time Machine from the menu bar and from there select “Enter Time Machine” to reach the Restore Interface.

Step 2: After this, you will see the screen with all your backup files and folders. Just navigate to the file or folder you want to restore.

Step 3: After selecting the file or folder you want to Restore, you will see the option for selecting date and time at the bottom right corner of the window. From there, you have to select which date you want to restore the backup by using the arrow keys up and down. See the image below for the reference.

Step 4: After selecting the date and the file or folder, now click on the Restore Button on the bottom of the screen. If you want to take a quick look at the file you want to restore, press the space bar after selecting the file.

With this step, the file or folder which you want to backup is done. Now, forget all the tensions and feel happy as your Mac data is safe with Time Machine.

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This is all for this tutorial. Hope these steps will work fine with your Mac and your backup will be created. If your problem is solved with this article, then please share it on social media and also with your friends. If you have any question or want to suggest something, please tell us in the comment section below. Your comments are valuable to us.