How Much Space Do I Need For A Backup
For iCloud backups, you can determine how much space you need by looking at the size of a particular file or folder.
You can see this info by:
1. Clicking on the file or folder and pressing Command + I.
2. Look at Size under the General section of the file information.
For a Time Machine backup, it’s recommended to have an external storage device with twice your Mac’s internal storage capacity. Here’s how to check the storage capacity of your Mac:
1. Click on the Apple menu and select About This Mac.
2. Click on the Storage tab to view the storage capacity of your Mac.
How To Back Up Select Files To Time Machine
The files you dont want to back up will now be excluded from your backup.
Now that you know how to back up your files, check out our step-by-step guide on how to restore from Time Machine here.
Make A Backup Via Icloud
With iCloud, you can store files in the cloud on the Apple server. You have access to iCloud with your Apple ID. As opposed to Time Machine, which makes a complete backup, you can only use iCloud to store the parts that fall within iCloud. That are your Contacts, Calendar, Keychain, Photos, and iCloud Drive, for example.
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Why Do You Need To Back Up
One copy of your data is no copies at all. That’s because hard drives and solid-state drives fail. By contrast, two copies of your data are really just one copy since there’s a chance both could fail at the same time.
To make sure your data is safe, you want to back it up in a way that minimizes the chance you could ever lose it. Realistically, that means a local backup and an off-site or online backup.
How To Restore A Mac From A Time Machine Backup
Backups are only useful when used to restore or recover data. Following is the procedure to recover data from a Time Machine backup. We will look at how to selectively restore files from Time Machine in the event of lost or deleted data. The selected files must have been included in one of your Time Machine backups for this method to work.
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Use Time Machine To Back Up Your Mac
As long as it knows where to store the files, Time Machine can be set to periodically backup your computer, though you can also manually trigger a backup. In fact, when you connect an external hard drive or SSD to your Mac, you may see a prompt asking if you want to use the drive with Time Machine.
Once Time Machine is set up, it will create and store one backup every hour for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and one backup a week for all previous months until it runs out of space. Once the backup drive is full, it will make room by deleting the oldest backups.
As far as how big of a drive to get, the rule of thumb is 1.5 to 2 times the size of your Mac’s hard drive. For example, if your Mac has 512GB of storage, you’ll want a 1TB drive. You can find an external hard drive or SSD for relatively little, and we even have a handy guide to the best drives.
The drive can be directly connected to your Mac or connected via your network.
- External USB, Thunderbolt or FireWire drive connected to your Mac
- Network-attached storage device that supports Time Machine over SMB
- Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination
- External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station or AirPort Time Capsule
- AirPort Time Capsule
To begin, plug the drive into your Mac and wait for the prompt to use it with Time Machine. If your Mac forgets its manners and doesn’t ask, select the drive to use by going to System Preferences > Time Machine and clicking the Select Disk button.
How To Backup Computer To Icloud On Windows
There’s something important you should know before using iCloud to back up a Windows computer. You need to set up iCloud on all of your Apple devices first. Otherwise you may fail to backup computer to iCloud. At present, you can backup documents to iCloud including mail, contacts, calendars, reminders and bookmarks. When you set up and use iCloud to backup Windows, all those selected files will be updated automatically on your Apple devices.
Step 1. Set up iCloud on Windows
Step 2. Backup Photos of Windows PC to iCloud
After checking the box of Photos, a folder named iCloud Photos will be generated on your Windows. If you add new photos or videos to the folder, they will be synchronized automatically so that you can access them on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac, and iCloud.com. If you use the latest version of iCloud for Windows, you can choose to pin photos to store them only on your computer. If you unpin them, they upload to iCloud and are open to other iOS devices of your Apple ID.
Step 3. Synchronize Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks to iCloud
After you choose to sync Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks, you can use iCloud for Windows to synchronize the items listed between your iOS devices and Outlook. After clicking Apply, you can launch Outlook to see whether the two are synchronized.
Step 4. Backup Bookmarks to iCloud
Note:
Step 5. See Windows backup files in iCloud Drive
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How To Back Up Your Mac With Time Machine
We have a step-by-step guide to backing up with Time Machine here, but essentially you just need to do the following:
We cover how to delete Time Machine Mac backups in a separate article.
Clone Your Mac With Disk Drill
Disk Drill software for Mac offers an easy & totally free way to clone your Mac. The tool can use the clone to enact data recovery functions or you can simply use it as a backup that is an exact copy of your original disk.
5 Steps you Need to Backup your Mac with Disk Drill:
It may take a while, but eventually the process will end and you will now have a large DMG file that contains the contents of your hard drive. This clone can be used for data recovery operations, or simply stored as a backup of your machine.
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Manually Backing Up Your Mac Files
The most basic way of backing up data on a Mac is to hook up a USB drive and then just drag and drop files into it. Its not sophisticated, and its only effective if you remember to do it. First, though, youll need to make sure your drive is ready for backups, using macOSs Disk Utility.
How to prepare an external drive for Mac backups:
1. Plug in an external drive, then open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities
2. Select the drive from the list on the left, then click Erase
3. Choose a formatting option from the Format dropdown menu. If you want to be able to access the files on a Windows PC, select ExFat
Otherwise, choose Mac OS Extended or APFS
4. Click Erase
How To Restore Your Ios Device Backups On A Mac
Now that we know how to backup iPhone to computer hard drives how can we restore our iPhone from a backup?
First things first: to do this, you will have to back your iPhone up to the Mac youre plugging it into. If you dont have a backup on your Mac, the only other way is to use iCloud. But if you followed the first set of instructions and have a backup of your iPhone on the Mac, heres how to restore it:
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How To Back Up Your Mac To An External Hard Drive With Time Machine
A local backup is the fastest way to backup your data. It involves moving your files over to an external hard drive. HDDs and SSDs have dropped greatly in price in recent years, so you should be able to pick one up relatively cheaply with a decent capacity. Local backup is a safe and reliable way to safeguard all of your important files, and it’s really easy to do.
Mac’s built-in Time Machine feature is the easiest way to perform a backup to an external hard drive. If the hard drive you’ve chosen isn’t formatted as Time Machine requires, you’ll need to format it to be fully compatible with macOS. This will remove everything from your backup disk, so you might want to transfer any files to a different device.
How To Restore Your Mac From A Backup
If you’re already using iCloud to sync your content, do you need to do a full backup? Yes. One of the biggest reasons a full backup is so important is to cover you if or when your device crashes, and you lose everything.
If you’re in the middle of a critical, time-sensitive project and your Mac poops out, you may have protected the document you’re working on in iCloud, but without a backup, you didn’t protect your apps or settings, and it’ll take you a long time to get things back the way you want them. With a recent backup, you can restore your Mac and continue working. You’ll be happier if you back up your Mac.
Looking for a new backup drive? Check out the best external hard drives. They work with the best Macs on the market.
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How Do I Transfer Everything From My Macbook Pro To An External Hard Drive
The easiest way to create a local backup of your MacBook data is to use Time Machine, Apple’s backup software included with macOS. There are plenty of other backup programs, but the basics of using them are roughly the same. To backup your MacBook data using Time Machine, follow these steps:
Get an external hard drive with more storage capacity than the size of the hard drive you want to back up. Connect it to your Mac.
Go to the Applemenu> System Preferences.
Select Time Machine.
Click Select Disk and select your external hard drive. The backup will begin automatically.
We recommend checking the box next to Show Time Machine in menu bar. That adds an icon for Time Machine in the top right corner of the screen. Click it and then click Back Up Now to start a backup whenever you want.
If you keep the hard drive connected to your Mac, Time Machine does all the work for you: It automatically backs up your hard drive every hour. It also manages your backups: it keeps hourly backups for one day, daily backups for a month, and then weekly backups for as long as you have storage space. If you run out of room, it automatically deletes the oldest backups.
What Does Time Machine Back Up
Time Machine backs up all the files on your computer, including apps, music, documents, photos, emails, and system files. When enabled, it will automatically back up your files on your Mac hourly, daily, or weekly.
Time Machine will check your computer for new, changed, and deleted files every hour to make new backups of your Mac. The application keeps a daily backup for the past month. It will also keep weekly backups as long as the storage device still has space. Once the storage device runs out of space, the oldest backups will be deleted.
Note: To use this application, youll need an external hard drive formatted for macOS. If you want to know more about how to format your hard drive for Mac computers, check out our step-by-step guide here.
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How To Back Up Your Mac Computer With Time Machine
Contents
Its important to regularly back up your Mac to protect all your personal data. Otherwise, you could lose all your family photos, work documents, and more when your hard drive fails or your computer crashes. Thankfully, all Mac computers these days make it easy to back up your files on a separate drive and restore them if anything happens to your computer. Heres how to back up your Mac with Time Machine.
How Much Icloud Storage Do I Need
For a full Mac backup , Apple recommends having twice the amount of storage space available to you as you use on your Mac. That said, iCloud backups tend to include a smaller amount of data than external drive backups since iCloud only backs up specific files and data, not all of the data, programs, and settings on your Mac. You won’t need as much storage on iCloud as you would with an external hard drive, but you’ll likely still need more than the free 5 GB of iCloud storage that each user has access to by default.
To back up more than 5 GB , you will need to sign up for a monthly subscription. Fortunately, iCloud storage plan pricing is pretty affordable! If you already have other Apple subscriptions, you may even be able to save money with an Apple One bundle.
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What About Online Or Cloud Backup
We live in the age of the internet. While local and offsite backups are a good enough solution to recommend them, there are considerable advantages to going to the cloud.
Similar to Time Machine, online backup “just works.” You pay for a subscription, download a utility, start it up, and then it churns away in the background copying your data to giant server farms and updating it as and when needed.
There’s typically also an option to send or receive hard drives if you have a large amount of data to get you started or in the event you need to recover.
BackBlaze and Carbonite are reliable services that have been around for years.
Backing Up To An External Drive
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