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Millions of people want to External Backup with Time Machine because of how nice it looks and how well it works. But the things on the laptop are more important than the laptop itself. If your Mac gets damaged or stops working, you should know how to back it up to an external hard drive so you can keep all your files.
On macOS, it’s pretty easy to back up everything, and since Time Machine is already installed, it doesn’t take long to get started. It’s also free to use, which is different from most other options. It does miss some things. For example, you can tell Time Machine to make automatic backups, but you can’t tell it how often to do them. Time Machine can instead make backups every hour for the last 24 hours, every day for the last month, or every week for all the months before.
There’s also no way to copy a drive. This means that you can’t easily make a copy of your hard drive and use it to start up your system and all of its files without having to go through the full process of restoring your files. The fact that Apple’s own backup solution doesn’t have these extra features doesn’t make it a bad choice. It has what most Mac users need to back up their Mac. So, let’s get started with our step-by-step guide on how to use Time Machine to back up your Mac to an external drive.
How to External Backup with Time Machine
- Head over to your Mac’s System Preferences menu, the cog icon found on your Mac’s dock
- Find the Time Machine icon (near the bottom) and click on it
- Once you’re in, click on Select Disk to pick the hard drive you want to save your backups to
- Next, you’ll need to click on Options… button at the bottom
- Here, you’ll find a list of hard drives that have been excluded from your Time Machine backups. If your external hard drive is there and you want to back it up, remove it from the list by clicking on the minus button and then Save.
Best Time Machine Alternatives
SuperDuper
SuperDuper is another alternative to Time Machine that makes a clone of your Mac hard drive that can be used to boot up. It also has scripting, smart updates, scheduling, backup-on-connect, eject-after-copy, and other features to make backing up your Mac as easy as possible.
SuperDuper doesn’t have as many features as CCC, but it’s a good choice if you want something simpler. And you can still schedule incremental backups, which are faster than making a full copy every time. SuperDuper can even be used for free, but you have to pay $27.95 to use all of its features. But this still costs less than CCC.
ChronoSync
ChronoSync gives you a number of ways to back up your Mac: you can clone it to an external drive that you can boot from, sync files to a different Mac, or even upload a backup to the cloud. It uses incremental backups to reduce file size and upload time, but it checks the metadata of each file instead of the content to make sure it catches any new changes to your Mac.
It also makes sure that files are still good before replacing them with new ones. You can choose to keep old backups in a compressed format to save space. This lets you go back in time through them, just like you can with Time Machine.
IDrive
Most cloud-based backup services only let you back up one computer per subscription. But IDrive lets you back up all of your Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, and Android devices to the same account. Even better, you can start out with 5GB of free cloud storage.
IDrive is usually more expensive than its competitors once you pay for a subscription. This is especially true since it can only hold up to 2TB of information. You might need to cut down on the size of your Mac backup so that you don’t run out of space.