HOW TO Back up and restore with Time Machine

1 Pick your target

Time Machine is best used with external storage such as a hard drive or SSD. It doesn’t need to be the fastest drive around, but if you don’t already have one it’s worth buying one with more storage than you think you need.

2 Exclude irrelevant bits

In System Preferences > Time Machine > Options, you can choose to exclude certain drives and folders from your Time Machine backups, so for example here, we can see our external Photos drive isn’t included.

3 Back up on battery

If you have a mobile Mac, look at the ‘Back up while on battery power’ checkbox; it’s off by default, which is great for battery life, but not ideal if you use your Mac on battery most of the time, so think about switching this on.

4 Make some backups

This is what your external drive will look like once Time Machine is running. As you can see by the date stamps our Mac is making a new backup every hour for 24 hours and then archiving one backup a day.

5 Inspect the backup

If you click on a Time Machine backup and press ⌘+I to show its info panel, you’ll see that it’s tiny; this backup is just 22MB out of over 200GB. That’s because Time Machine does incremental backups; it only copies what’s changed.

6 Travel in time

The menu bar icon will spin when Time Machine is doing a backup. Click on the icon to see the current backup status, to skip the current backup – handy if you’re doing something demanding – or to see the preferences.

7 Turn back the clock

Getting things back via Time Machine is easy. Here, we’ve lost some important media files that we used to have in this folder; we just open the folder in Finder, click the Time Machine icon and select Enter Time Machine.

8 Retrace your steps

You can now travel back in time by either clicking just above the window, by using the arrows to the side of it, or by making big leaps using the timeline at the right. We’ve browsed to an older version of the folder that has our files in it.

9 Restore your stuff

All you need to do now is highlight the file(s) or folder(s) you want to restore and click on the Restore button. That’ll take you out of Time Machine and back to the present, but with your missing files back where they belong.