USING MAC TIME MACHINE PLUS

If you need to exclude other folders just click on the plus sign and browse to the desired folder.

To exclude folder or drives from being backed up click on Options button.īy default, all external drives will be excluded.

Choose if you want to Back Up Automatically.Īutomatic backups assume that you either have an external hard drive constantly plugged-in or network storage such as Apple AirPort Time Capsule.

USING MAC TIME MACHINE PASSWORD

Encrypting backups is a recommended approach, but remember, however, if you forget the password no one (even Apple) will be able to decrypt the backups later. You can also check the Encrypt Backups option to make sure that all backups are encrypted with a password. Select the volume and click on Use Disk button. If the external disk has multiple partitions, then all partitions will appear as possible volumes for back up. This will open a window with a list of volumes available.

Start the Time Machine from System Preferences.

USING MAC TIME MACHINE HOW TO

How to back up with the Time Machine on Mac Now, when we know all the theory behind TM backup let’s see it in action. If the disk is shared with other applications the way to limit the Time Machine from expanding is to create a fixed partition on the disk and use the partition as a backup disk. How to Limit the size of backup disk for Time MachineĪlthough the Time Machine can clear space from old backups it prefers to expand to the entire disk to avoid deleting old backups as long as possible. TM will not delete the last version of file1.txt because there is still hard link (from the last back up) pointing to it. When the backup disk fills up TM will delete old (first) version of file1.txt and the last version of file2.txt. If there is enough space TM will store 2 versions of file1.txt and deleted version of file2.txt. The file1.txt was changed once and file2.txt was deleted. For example, let’s assume we have two files file1.txt and file2.txt. When TM deletes it still keeps the latest version of the file. While the Time Machine deletes old versions of the file it never deletes the latest one.

USING MAC TIME MACHINE FULL

When the drive is full the Time Machine deletes old backups to free space for new data. The Time Machine keeps adding backup files as long as there is enough space on the backup disk. The Time Machine does not create monthly backups. After 24 hours it creates a daily backup for one month and weekly backups for multiple months. The Time Machine keeps up to 24 hourly backups. If the Time Machine is set to back up automatically it will run once every hour. After that, the Time Machine only saves contents of files that have changed since the last run and uses hard links to the previously backed files and folders to optimize the storage and speed up the backup process How often does Time Machine backup The Time Machine does a full backup only for the first time. So, with this knowledge we can answer the following question: Does Time Machine do a full backup every time To optimize further, in case if the folder did not change since last backup TM creates a hard link on a folder instead of thousands of hard links on each file inside the folder so the incremental backup runs very fast. So, if initial backup copied 100,000 files and only one file has changed since then only one file will be copied during the second backup. Now if we make a change to fil1.txt then when next backup runs TM will copy file1.txt to a new folder and create a hard link to file2.txt from a previous backup without copying its contents. For the files that have not changed, it creates hard links that point to the actual files in a previous backup.įor instance, if initially, we had two files: file1.txt and file2.txt, they both will be copied on the first backup.

When TM runs next time it only copies files that have changed to a new folder. When the first backup runs Time Machine copies all files from a startup disk to a new folder on the backup disk. Time Machine (TM) on Mac uses hard links (wiki) concept to create backup folders. After the backup was done it is possible to restore individual files, applications or entire storage to a previous version. When it runs first, the Time Machine makes a full backup and performs incremental backups after that.

USING MAC TIME MACHINE SOFTWARE

Time Machine is a free built-in backup software which copies Mac disk contents to external storage. While I was doing different experiments on my MacBook, I always knew that I can restore the contents of my MacBook to the working state because I have made backups with the Time Machine.

Using mac time machine