How to back up a Mac using Time Machine. How to back up MAC OS with Time Machine Mac OS backup
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Agree that having backups hidden somewhere is vital. Of course now hard disks reliable as never before, but they can still fail from time to time. Many consider Time Machine to be the default backup solution for Macs, but you'd be surprised to find out how many more there are.
Today we will tell you how you can set up Time Machine and give you a short overview of various backup utilities, including several online tools.
Since it comes bundled with OS X, it is by far the most convenient solution available. It requires the presence external hard disk and will automatically copy data for hours without your intervention. File recovery occurs through an excellent, just space, interface.
Price: free
Developer: Apple
Requirements: OS X Leopard
- a fairly popular utility for creating an exact clone of one hard drive on another. It's useful for maintaining a bootable copy of your Mac's hard drive so you can easily continue working even if the drive fails. The interface of the program is quite simple, and the reliability of its work has been proven over the years.
Finally, we bring to your attention - a great tool for fine tuning Applications I'm backing up Leopard. The Time Machine Editor allows you to change the interval between copies and change other settings. Very convenient and completely free.
Price: free
Developer:
Requirements: Mac OS X Leopard
Don't limit yourself to Time Machine, there is a whole range of software that can take you to the next level of security.
How do you take care of data security on your machine?
In order not to lose the configuration of Mac OS X settings dear to your heart and a set of installed and properly configured programs, you need to make backup copies of your operating system from time to time.
Despite the reliability and stability, MacOS X can still fall incorrect actions users. And at the most inopportune moment. But after all, no one wants to lose at the same time a personal configuration of settings so dear to the heart and a set of installed and properly configured programs ...
In order not to find yourself in such a situation, it is imperative to make backup copies of your operating system from time to time.
Unlike the numerous difficulties and prohibitions associated with the cloning of living beings, no one interferes with the creation exact copy your Mac OS X on another piece of hardware.
Cloning animals is difficult, long and illegal, but operating systems are simple, fast and, in a sense, even mandatory.
So, we create our "apple" sheep Dolly.
time machine
There are many ways. First Opportunity Reserve copy your system is built into MAC OS X itself, starting with version 10.5 and later. This is Time Machine.
Time Machine's automatic mode backs up the system and all important files on an external hard drive and must "go back in time" to restore system files in its original form at the moment you need it. If you turn on Time Machine in System Preferences, it will prompt you to create "backups" (backup copies) and ask for a directory to save them.
But Time Machine has a couple of drawbacks. The first of them - it very quickly "devours" disk space. Although not completely. After you create your first backup, Time Machine continues to save only changed files.
The second problem is that automatic copying prevents it from working normally, starting by itself.
In order to somehow level this, we turn to additional application, which allows you to configure Time Machine itself.
This is TimeMachineEditor. You can download it. TimeMachineEditor will allow you to customize the schedule of your procedures more flexibly. For example, hourly on Mondays, daily after work, and so on.
Using this utility, we increase the intervals of “time jumps”, “curbing the appetite” of Time Machine itself, and adjust its backup sessions to a schedule that is convenient for us.
Thus, Time Machine has the ability to back up your system in case of various failures and “roll back” back, but it is cumbersome and not very convenient for this purpose. Including the "backup" disk is not bootable and requires starting from the installation Mac disk OSX.
Disk Utility/Disk Utility
Another way to "grow" your "clone sheep" is to use the regular disk utility. By default, it is located in the Programs / Utilities folder (Applications / Utilites).
We launch this application and select the name of your system disk in the menu on the left, for example, X. Now drag the icon of your start disk (X) to the window of the line "Source" (Source), and the icon of the disk to the line "Target" (Destination), on which will save your clone, for example, Backup. This can be an external FireWire or USB drive, or an internal HDD or a flash drive of sufficient volume.
If you need to format this directory first, switch to Erase. For external media, the format does not matter (as a rule, it is Mac OS Extended Journaled (Journaled), and for a hard drive on a Mac with Intel processor, it is preferable to select GUID Partition Table.
Now click "Restore" (Restore) and enter your password. Go.
After a while, another “Dolly Sheep” will be born - an absolute copy of your system disk.
Now, if your Mac OS X fatally "collapses", and no "healers" will help, you can repeat this procedure in reverse, replacing the damaged system with your saved copy.
To do this, you need to “start” from the backup system itself: turn on your Mac while holding the option key, then select the disk with the finished clone as bootable (in our example, Backup) and perform the recovery procedure in reverse order.
But before you do this, you must definitely try to "cure" the damaged system with the same "Disk Utility".
Select the “corrupted” disk in the left menu (in our example, this is X and in the “First Aid” section, perform the procedures: “Verify Disk Permission) and, if necessary, do “Restore access rights” ( Repair Disk Permission) and, accordingly, “Check Disk” (Verify Disk) - “Repair Disk” (Repair Disk).
An indispensable help here can be provided by the familiar OnyX program.
Despite the simplicity of cloning using Disk Utility, this method has one drawback. Absolutely all, without exception, information is copied. And if we are talking about a small spare disk, or even about a flash drive? Files may simply not fit on them.
What is the choice?
There are many possibilities for cloning your Dolly Sheep. Until use command line according to instructions from Apple itself. "Mere mortals" may find other utilities more accessible, such as SuperDuper!, Clone X, Tri-BACKUP or MacTuneUp. In my opinion, the most advanced among them, convenient and at the same time absolutely free is called Carbon Copy Cloner.
Carbon Copy Cloner is made by Bombich Software. You can download it. Voluntary donations to developers (Donate) are welcome.
Mike Bombich, the creator of this wonderful program, in an interview with a popular American site, emphasized the "highlights" of his offspring: the speed of the cloning process, the possibility of selective data transfer and additional protection from random actions in the form of a special list of all possible candidate disks with a request for their ID (Unique Identifier).
Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to create a complete or partial clone of your system, transferring it to another disk or saving it as a .dmg (disk image). In the latest versions of Carbon Copy Cloner, focused on the Snow Leopard system (Snow Leopard), compression is supported in file system HFS+, displaying the sizes of folders and disks in decimal system has become noticeably more convenient, copying speed has increased, and Time Machine databases are ignored if they have already been created.
Carbon Copy Cloner can be very useful when upgrading the system disk and replacing it with a more capacious one. It is enough to transfer the previously rejected system to a new disk.
Before you start backing up your system, it would be a good idea to first clean out all the “garbage” that has accumulated in the system using the OnyX utility and put it in order.
Install Carbon Copy Cloner and run. If needed during work, enter your usual password and unlock the "lock" at the bottom left.
At the top left, in the Source Disk menu (Resource disk), select the one from which your system will be cloned (in our example, this is disk X).
At the top right Target Disk, select the one on which the “twin” of your MAC OS X will be saved. (In our case, X2. It is important to note here that this utility has the ability to write the system in .dmg format and even to remote computer over the network.
Now let's take a look at another feature of Carbon Copy Cloner: create special filters that allow you to exclude some files from the clone based on the extension, for example. mkv or .avi, and then films of this format will not be cloned. This will help save space.
In order not to complicate our lives, let's try to manually do some preliminary procedures to make the backup system easier and speed up the cloning process.
It is not necessary to save your entire media library to a system backup: digital photos, music, movies, supporting documentation, and so on. As well as working files that can "weigh" more than one gigabyte. You can also refuse "heavy programs" if there is not enough space on the backup disk.
Find in the left window Items to be copied (Items to be copied) and look carefully, turning off some checkboxes next to unnecessary files. If they are not stored on your disk at random, then most likely they will be the Users (Users) / macuser (your username) directories. For example, in this configuration, we disable the Calibrie Library (Base of libraries for reading) and the books contained in it. After all, they are already recorded on a separate DVD.
Then in the section on the right Cloning options (Clone mode) select Incremental backups of selected items (incremental "backup" of selected items) this dynamic mode will only transfer changed data when you update the version of the backup system next time. The checkbox below Delete items that don't exist on the source in synchronization mode will not "take with it" old programs and other files that you have not used for a long time.
Protect root-level items on the target will preserve root mode if you are. And finally, Archive modified and deleted items will allow you to create a separate archive of modified and deleted items. deleted files. In my opinion, it is better to turn it off so as not to waste time.
In the event that Carbon Copy Cloner "gives the go-ahead" - This volume will be bootable - which means that there is enough space on the spare disk or flash drive, and this volume will become bootable, you can start.
All made by you presets will be saved if you click Save Task in the event that you are going to make clones of your disk on a specific schedule, as in Time Machine. But for creating a backup Mac OS X, this is hardly useful.
Click Clone (clone).
How many files are stored on your system drive? Turns out there are tens of thousands. so the process can take some time: from fifteen minutes to an hour or two. It depends on the amount of information.
And so it ended. Now we have two "Dolly sheep" - mirror Mac OS X. And you can be sure that you will not be left with nothing at the most inopportune moment.
Not all Mac users are concerned about backing up their data. Even the presence of a simple standard Time Machine utility in macOS does not motivate you to set up backups.
It turns out that in the desktop operating room Apple system There is one more not the most obvious way to back up data. It is based on a combination of two features of the iCloud cloud service.
One of them was the ability to synchronize data from the desktop and the Documents folder between computers. It was she who formed the basis of this method.
How to setup
The method will work on any Mac computer. It is enough to make the following settings:
1. You need to make sure that the account is connected to the computer Apple entry ID ( Settings - iCloud).
2. In the parameters, enable the option Folders "Desktop" and "Documents".
That's all, nothing more is needed.
How it works
We just put the file on the desktop and wait until the synchronization with the cloud is completed (the corresponding indicators in the Finder will disappear). 
Any data that has been uploaded to the cloud will be available from any device, and if you accidentally delete something superfluous, you can restore files from backup.
We recall another feature of the cloud service -. If you need a copy of the data, do the following:
1. We go to iCloud through the web interface.
2. Go to Settings and open the file recovery section.
3. We select the necessary data and restore them.
What restrictions
The main limitation is 5 GB of free space in the cloud. At the time of copying the file to the desktop, its size should not exceed the remaining free space in iCloud.
If there is not enough space, you can either purchase. It is not necessary to do this; for small files, photos or documents, there will be enough space anyway.
The second limitation is the 30-day storage period for iCloud backups. After a month, the file that was deleted from the Mac will be deleted from the backup iCloud copies without the possibility of recovery.
Thanks to re:Store for an interesting feature!
Fair, not too high or too low. There should be prices on the Service website. Necessarily! without "asterisks", clear and detailed, where it is technically possible - the most accurate, final.
If spare parts are available, up to 85% percent of complex repairs can be completed in 1-2 days. Modular repairs take much less time. The site indicates the approximate duration of any repair.
Warranty and Liability
A warranty should be given for any repair. Everything is described on the site and in the documents. A guarantee is self-confidence and respect for you. A 3-6 month warranty is good and enough. It is needed to check the quality and hidden defects that cannot be detected immediately. You see honest and realistic terms (not 3 years), you can be sure that you will be helped.
Half the success in Apple repair is the quality and reliability of spare parts, so a good service works directly with suppliers, there are always several reliable channels and a warehouse with proven spare parts for current models so that you do not have to waste extra time.
Free diagnostics
This is very important and has already become a rule of good taste for service center. Diagnosis is the most difficult and important part of the repair, but you should not pay a dime for it, even if you do not repair the device after it.
Service repair and delivery
Good service appreciates your time, therefore offers free shipping. And for the same reason, repairs are carried out only in the workshop of the service center: it can be done correctly and according to technology only at a prepared place.
Convenient schedule
If the Service works for you, and not for itself, then it is always open! absolutely. The schedule should be convenient in order to be in time before and after work. Good service works on weekends and holidays. We are waiting for you and working on your devices every day: 9:00 - 21:00
The reputation of professionals consists of several points
Age and experience of the company
Reliable and experienced service is known for a long time.
If a company has been on the market for many years, and it has managed to establish itself as an expert, they turn to it, write about it, recommend it. We know what we are talking about, since 98% of incoming devices in the SC are restored.
We are trusted and passed on complex cases to other service centers.
How many masters in the directions
If you are always waiting for several engineers for each type of equipment, you can be sure:
1. there will be no queue (or it will be minimal) - your device will be taken care of immediately.
2. you give away macbook repair an expert in the field of Mac repairs. He knows all the secrets of these devices
technical literacy
If you ask a question, the specialist must answer it as accurately as possible.
To give you an idea of what you need.
Will try to solve the problem. In most cases, from the description, you can understand what happened and how to fix the problem.
No matter who you are, you should always back up your Mac. It's like life insurance, except for yours digital files. You never know when something might happen to your Mac and you should always have a backup plan in place for emergencies; someone might spill a drink on your Mac, your hard drive might crash, you might lose your Mac, and your Mac might even get a virus on rare occasions.
So, you want to know how to backup your Mac? In this article, you will learn about many ways and better ways backup your Mac. We have 5 tips for you on how to backup Mac devices And we even have a bonus tip that will make it easy to back up your Mac with just a few clicks.
Adviсe:
Article Guide
Option 1: How to backup Mac with Time Machine
- Connect an external storage device to your Mac.
- When your Mac connects successfully, your Mac may be asked if you want to use Time Mac
- Click "Use as a backup disk".
If there is no warning, double check that the disc format is correct.
- It must be Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
If the warning still does not appear, you should:
- Open system settings
- Select Time Machine
- Select Backup Disk
- Then choose your storage device
Option 2: How to backup Mac via iCloud
- Open System settings on your Mac
- click on iCloud.
- Sign in to iCloud.
- Check the box next to iCloud.
- Click on the "Settings" field in the iCloud row.
- Check the box next to the things you want to keep in iCloud
In addition, you can:
- Click Finder you will see iCloud Drive Folder in the panel on the left.
- Move any folder on your Mac that isn't already in iCloud to your iCloud Drive .
Option 3: How to backup Mac with Dropbox
- To come in
- Download and install software
- Once the software is installed on your Mac, open Dropbox
- The web interface will open and you can copy your files there.
- Click on Upload Files or Upload Folder on the right
- Find the folder you want to download.
- Click on Select.
- Wait for the download to finish
In addition, you can also
- When DropBox is installed on your Mac, you will see a Dropbox tab under Favorites in Finder. Just drag and drop anything into this folder and it will be saved to Dropbox.
Option 4: How to back up a Mac with an online backup service
Please note that the process for backing up your Mac will vary depending on the service, but in general it will be something like this:
- Register an account, possibly a subscription or advance payment
- Install their software and start the installation process.
- The process may start immediately or you may need to initiate it yourself.
- The process may take some time.
- If you want the process to be faster, you can manipulate some of the settings or select only what you want to back up.
Option 5: How to backup your Mac by cloning your Mac
Note that the process for cloning your Mac will vary depending on the software, but in general it will look like this:
- As with Time Machine, you'll need to connect an external mass storage device to your Mac.
- If you need to format external storage:
- Open Disk Utility
- Select external drive
- Click "Erase"
- Format options
- Select MacOS Extended (Journaled)
- Click Erase again
- Open the cloning software.
- Look for the "Copy" to external drive option.
** Make sure all necessary files are backed up, otherwise your clone may not load.
- You may be prompted for a password to confirm the transfer
- Wait for the translation to finish
Before backing up your Mac, you should make sure that there are no junk files on your Mac. You don't want to back up your Mac along with all the other files you don't need. Junk files can also be the reason why your Mac is running slowly. You can even back up your files due to a virus on your Mac, but if you back up your Mac along with a virus, you may have other problems. So before you even start backing up your Mac, make sure you use Clean Up Your Mac.
PowerMyMac by iMyMac is a powerful all-in-one tool with many features to clean up your Mac. It has built-in tools like performance monitor, memory extractor, application uninstaller, smart cleanup and cleanup module.
Of the many features on PowerMyMac A cleaner module, we will teach you how to use the System Junk utility to clean junk files from your Mac. If you know how to use this tool, you will have an idea of how to use other tools as the steps for this tool are similar to other tools.
- Run the program.
- Using the program's main interface, you should check your Mac's system status if everything is ok to avoid backing up a slow or infected version of your Mac.
- Once you find that your Mac is fine, click on the "Cleaner" button and you will see "System Junk".
- Click System Junk and the program will start scanning system cache, application cache, and other system components on your Mac. In the left circle you will see the progress of the scan.
- After the scan is done, you should review the scanned items in case you don't want to delete certain files. If necessary, you can also return to the previous page to rescan if you find that some garbage is missing.
- Click the "Clear" button to remove system junk files on your Mac. You may also need to enter a password when prompted.
- Press the confirmation button after pressing the "Clear" button.
- Let the cleanup process complete, but this may take some time.
Now that you know how to back up your Mac, just remember our bonus tip and don't forget to clean up your Mac before backing up your Mac. There are many ways to back up your Mac, but all of these options won't be enough if you don't clean up your Mac before backing up your Mac. Use any of these options to back up your Mac and don't forget to use before backing up your Mac.