Work with Time Machine

Discover smart techniques for handling your backups

We all know it’s wise to back up our computers, and you've probably found out how easy macOS makes it by plugging in a drive and confirming that’s what it’s for.

Once it’s active, you can expect the Time Machine backup feature to do its work quietly in the background while you do yours. But when you need to dip into its backups, there are some tricks that’ll help you.

Typically that’ll be to restore an old version of a file over the latest one, but there are other things you can do, such as deleting all copies of a file you didn’t intend to back up. Here are our top tips.

1 SELECT AND RECOVER

Like in Finder on the desktop, you can select one or more items from the same time and folder in your backups. Hold Cmd and then click files and folders you want to recover in order to add them to your selection.

2 NARROW YOUR SEARCH

Not sure which file is the one you want? Open a Finder window and type criteria in its search bar, then enter Time Machine. This enables you to find matches at each time, helping pinpoint files that may have moved.

3 INSPECT ITEMS

While exploring backups, you can use Quick Look to take a closer look inside files for extra confirmation of their contents. Select some files, press the Spacebar and use the arrows (top left) to check them out.

4 RESTORE TO…

Click Restore and your selection is copied back to its original location. You get a choice of overwriting the latest version or keeping it as well. Or, Ctrl–click the selection and pick the option to restore to another location.

5 DELETE ALL COPIES

Enter Time Machine, find a file you don’t want backed up. Ctrl– click it and choose ‘Delete All Backups of...’. To stop a file being backed up, add it to the list behind the Options button in System Prefs’ Time Machine pane.

6 VERIFY INTEGRITY

If Time Machine says it can’t back up, check the drive’s connection. If okay, hold Opt, click Time Machine’s menu icon — turn it on in its prefs — and choose Verify Backups, then simply follow the on–screen instructions.