Looking to take things further?
Pro tips for those looking to go beyond the standard backing-up process
Exclude items
By default, Time Machine backs up your entire system. This is useful for the first comprehensive backup, but after that there might be items you don’t want to include.
By going into the Time Machine System Preference pane and clicking the Options button you can add any files or folders you don’t want backed up. Typical examples of stuff you might exclude are large movie files that you may watch once then delete, temporary items like installer disk images and data that you may be storing temporarily before copying it to another drive. Virtual machine files from apps such as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop can be huge and since they change every time you use them, they’ll be backed up repeatedly – so it may be better to exclude these and back them up separately.
Use multiple drives
In OS X 10.8 and 10.9, Time Machine is able to use multiple hard drives to back up the same Mac, which is incredibly useful because you can keep several current backups for greater security. Specify each drive as a destination and then when each one is connected perform a backup and it will be brought up to date by Time Machine. You can mix networked and DAS (directly connected) hard drives using this method. You can also back up correctly formatted hard drives connected to your Mac by going into the preferences and making sure they are not excluded, since they will be by default.
Encrypt backups
OS X 10.9 uses FileVault 2 – Apple’s latest system encryption technology. To encrypt your backups, go to the Time Machine System Preference pane and click the Select Disk button, and then select the disk and turn on Encrypt Backups. The initial process might take a while, but your backups will be fully encrypted and secure. If you’re backing up to a NAS or network drive you need to manually create an encrypted .sparseimage file on the target drive using Disk Utility and then specify this as the backup target in Time Machine.
Tweak backup frequency
Time Machine has a preset backup frequency that’s hourly for the past day, daily for the past month and weekly for all previous months. However, you may not want to back up every hour since it may interfere with disk-intensive processes or rapidly fill up your backup drive. Using a free tool such as Time Machine Editor (timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor) you can change the backup frequency to something much more specific, nominating days and times for backups. You might want to set it to back up at the end of each work day, for example, but not over the weekend.