Make manual backups of entire older MacBook Pro. Have high sierra thru time machine.
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George Iluk
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How To Format Ext. Hard Drive and Back Up Manually With Time Machine ?
Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Format Ext. Hard Drive and Back Up Manually With Time Machine ?”
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All you need to do to format the drive is to select it as a Time Machine drive. You do that in System Preferences, Time Machine. Simply click the Select Disk button. Then select the drive. It will erase and format it for you.
To have your backups set to manual, just uncheck the "Back Up Automatically" box in the same location. But you shouldn't do that. Backups are far more effective if you have them happen on a regular basis. Time Machine will automatically back up every hour, and you should let it. This will keep your backup current, and also provide many older versions of all of your files. So if you made a change to a file two weeks ago, you can go back and grab a version from before that time.
Also, automatic hourly backups are quick. If you do it manually and wait a few days, each backup will take much longer as it has to catch up with all of the changed files.
Does it matter if the drive becomes full? I use two external hard drives as alternative backups and when I check them "info" it shows they are full. Backups work just fine, but discs are full.
Mike: If they are Time Machine backups then eventually they will become full. Time Machine will keep storing versions of files until it fills up the drive. Then it will remove older versions as needed. It always keeps at least the current version of every file, but tries to have as many older versions available for you as it can.
hi. while searching out solution for my problem i came across this article. it speaks in details of use of time machine.
the article: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250
source: Official apple discussion