Cheat sheet: Recover lost work

Discover the power of Time Machine and Versions to recover your files

Your Mac comes with a built-in backup system called Time Machine that’s very easy to use. It only takes a minute or two to get started with it, and it then backs up any changes made to the files on your Mac roughly once an hour. It’s easy to overlook some of this feature’s capabilities, so this cheat sheet gives an overview of the various ways to recover changed words, files you’ve trashed by mistake, or even your whole setup if a big problem occurs or you buy a new Mac.

If you use a portable Mac, you may notice different colored notches in Time Machine’s timeline. Bright red represents local snapshots, which are explained opposite. By upgrading to High Sierra, you stand to benefit from an important improvement to when they are created: your MacBook will create a local snapshot immediately before any update to macOS itself is installed, providing a fallback should something go wrong during the update. Read on for more backup and restoration tips.