Can you please explain Time Machine in more detail? Do I need to purchase an Airport Extreme to make it work?
Time Machine is Apple’s easy-to-use backup solution that has been included with all Macs since Leopard (OS 10.5). Time Machine backs up to an external hard drive connected to your Mac, or over your network with an AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule backup drive. An AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule is not required -- you can simply use any external drive you might have lying around. In the unfortunate event that you lose something important, you can activate Time Machine and easily go back to an earlier version of a file.
Time Machine backs up your computer hourly, keeping the hourly backups for one day, then daily backups for a month, and weekly backups until your drive is full. For the most security, your backup drive should be at least as big as the internal drive in your Mac. The larger your drive, the more discrete versions of your documents Time Machine will be able to store.
Remove already-excluded folders by selecting them in the list and clicking the - button.
To begin backing up, plug in the external drive, and navigate to System Preferences > Time Machine. Once there, flip the switch to On. Select a backup drive, then Time Machine will begin backing up your Mac in the background whenever the external drive is mounted on your Mac.
In the same preference pane, you can also set Time Machine to exclude backing up certain folders in order to save space on your backup drive. To do this, click on the Options button, and then click on the + button under “Exclude these items from backups.” Excluding Applications and other system-level folders will give you more room to store more important stuff like your Documents, Photos, and Music folders.
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kimptoc
September 27, 2011 at 7:06am
I find it works seamlessly for me - using a Time Capsule.
Just migrated to Lion and I dont see the option to use local snapshots - do I need to delete the old backup or something to get that?
Thanks,
Chris
cadam
September 26, 2011 at 6:33pm
TM is a bit of a pain. It slows the system down considerably, enough so that users have developed a free app to do what Apple should have done: enable TM to do the backups at a time selected by the user. The app is called TM Editor. I tried it for a while, but it had absolutely no effect, even tho' there are many satisfied customers. TM on my mac desktop still started up as soon as I started working, even tho’ I had it turned off and had TME set to do backups after midnight. Obviously something else is going on. My only solution to the frustrating mac slowdown (which Apple should fix!) is to switch off the 750 tb drive when I start up. Any solutions, apple?
Geoduck
September 26, 2011 at 9:45am
"Time Machine backs up to an external hard drive connected to your Mac, or over your network with an AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule backup drive. "
It will work with any networked drive.
I have a NAS drive connected to my Airport via Ethernet. TimeMachine works just fine.
