A Guide On How To Back Up Your Mac

There are times when things screw up and you end up losing your Mac data. Instance: Corrupted files, hardware problems, App conflict, and more. So you need to back up your data in order to get them back in those cases. However, not all users know how to do this. So in this article, I have made a small guide on how to back up your Mac data. Let’s check it out

Save Your Data On iCloud

Backing up your data on the iCloud Drive will keep them safe and you can access them across all your devices including Mac, iPhone, iPad, or even Windows PCs. Everything you need to do is set up the iCloud Drive on your devices. Your data will automatically be saved on your iCloud and synced between all the devices. If it’s necessary, you can download anything you have synced/backed-up on your iCloud drive to your Mac. However, this is only limited to documents, photos, music, videos, and some apps data.

Back Up Your Mac With Time Machine

Time Machine is an amazing built-in feature in macOS. Unlike iCloud, it will help you backup ALL of your Mac data after you set it up. It just works silently, backing up files, apps, system files, and so on. So when they somehow get deleted, you can restore them easily from the backups. And all you need for creating a backup with Time Machine is an external storage device.

Here are the steps to set up the Time Machine:

Connect the external storage device to your Mac. You can check which external devices you can use here. The device should have at least the same amount of storage that your Mac’s hard drive has. You can connect it directly to your Mac or through a NAS network. Personally, I noticed that the network connection is slow, so it’s best to connect the external storage drive directly to your computer.
Open Time Machine on Your Mac
A Pop up Screen will show up and ask if you want to use the drive to back up with Time Machine.
Select Encrypt Backup Disk (recommended). An encrypted backup can only be accessed by users with the password.
Click Use as Backup Disk.
And that’s it! After you select a backup disk, Time Machine immediately begins making periodic backups. This will be done automatically and requires no further actions

The first backup may take a while as it will back up all your files. You can still use your Mac during the process. With future backups, the process will be much faster as Time Machine backs up only the files that have been changed or modified since the previous backup. When the hard drive runs out, Time Machine will automatically delete the oldest backups so that your computer is always backed up.

Restore Your Backup With Time Machine

You can restore file by file, folder by folder, or entire system using the Time Machine. You can check out this guide to know how to restore your data from a Time Machine backup.