Your Mac would back up when the drive is connected. You could disconnect your external drive when using your MacBook during the day and plug it in when you get home in the evening. If your drive is connected to the computer or the network location is available, it will back up once per hour. Time Machine normally functions automatically. Future backups won’t take as long, as only new and changed files will have to be backed up. The first Time Machine backup will take the longest, as everything on your drive is backed up.

For example, you could exclude your /Applications folder to save space on the Time Machine backup. While Time Machine does include everything by default, you can click the Options button in the Time Machine window and exclude certain folders. RELATED: Save Space on Your Time Machine Drive by Excluding These Folders From Backups This provides you with a way to recover deleted files or restore previous versions of files even if you’re away from your backup drive for a while. Your Mac will save a single daily snapshot as well as a single weekly snapshot of your files to its internal storage if the Time Machine backup drive isn’t available. RELATED: How to Set Up Your Mac to Act as a Networked Time Machine DriveĮnabling Time Machine on a MacBook will also enable the “local snapshots” feature. Choose the one that's right for you and within your budget.You can even have your Mac back up to multiple locations, rotating between them so you can have backups in two or more locations. There are various choices for restoring your Mac from an external backup in macOS Big Sur and macOS Ventura. It is very time-consuming and less efficient than restoring directly from an external hard drive you have sitting right on your desk. You can then select the files and folders you want to restore from your backup menu.īecause you either have to download files from the Internet or send them away for a physical copy, I only recommend using a cloud-based backup service to restore your Mac if you don't already have a local backup on hand.

Open Time Machine preferences from the Time Machine menu in. Shut down your Mac, and then hold down Command+R while. The first thing you need to do is access Recovery Mode. You can launch the remote app on your Mac or visit the company's website. If Time Machine doesnt ask you to choose a backup disk when you connect the drive to your. How to Fully Restore macOS From a Time Machine Backup in Recovery Mode. Most programs will have a Restore files tool right in the user interface. All of them will require that you download a backup from their remote servers, though - unless the service offers to send you a physical hard drive that you can use as a backup (Backblaze provides this feature). If you use a cloud-based backup service, like Backblaze or CrashPlan, you can download missing data to restore your Mac.Įach cloud-based backup service is different. How to back up your Mac to an online backup service (Image credit: Joseph Keller / iMore)

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