The Practical Guide To Mac Security: Part 12, Back Up With Time Machine

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. This is Part 12 of my course The Practical Guide to Mac security. It's brought to you free thanks to my great Patreon supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could find out more. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

So let's talk about backing up your Mac. Your Mac comes with built-in backup software. It's part of macOS and it's called Time Machine. So if you just want to use Time Machine you have everything you need as far as software. All you need to do is get a backup drive. In most cases all you need for a backup drive is a simple external drive. So picking out a Time Machine drive is pretty easy. Just go to your favorite e-commerce site, like Amazon, and note that you don't need to get an SSD. A lot of people who want to really, you know, overdo it in terms of a backup. Get the best of the best will think, okay an SSD will be faster. It will be more reliable. Whatever. You don't need to spend all the money on an SSD. What's important is you get something that's large. Something that can hold all of the files on your Mac. As a matter of fact it should hold them many times over. At least twice the size. So if you have say a 512 GB drive on your Mac, a TB drive is the minimum. But I would never get just a terabyte drive. You might as well go to 2 or 4 terabytes. Get as large as you possibly can. Make sure it's a USB 3 drive because there are still USB 2 drives floating around out there that can be a little bit cheaper and, you know, it's hard to tell the difference. But if you look carefully USB 3 is much faster than USB 2. So don't waste your money on a USB 2 drives if there are any hanging around at a discount.

There are two types of drives. There are portable drives that you connect to your Mac by USB and that's it. That's the only cable. Non-portable drives are ones that have their own power supply. Portable can be handy. You just plug it into your Mac. Say you have an iMac. You plug it in and you're done. Or if you have a MacBook Pro or something like that you can plug it in and that's it. You don't have to then also find a way to plug it into the wall and power it up. When you're looking for an external drive look for external hard drive. Just search for that term and you'll come up with lots of things. Let me give you two examples. So here on Amazon I have searched for external hard drives and I'm going to look at one here. It's a simple 5 TB portable hard drive, so it's not a SSD, not a solid state drive. Just a regular spinning drive. It's portable so it's compact and it doesn't have to be plugged into the wall. It's $100. You'll find a lot of different drives from different brands that are about 4 or 5 TB for a hundred dollars. You can use this. It's ideal to backup a Mac that's 1 TB or less in stuff as you can backup what you've got several times over.

Another thing you might want to look for is a drive that's not portable like this one. This one requires you to plug it into the wall as well as to the computer itself. But other than that it works pretty much the same. It's a little bit larger. But look at the sizes here. You can go way up here in size. Now a lot of these are usually available. I'm looking at one that seems to be readily available now. But things will change by the time you view this and look for your own Time Machine drive. So I could do a 12 TB drive here for less than $300 and, you know, when I have a Mac that has a few TB of hard drive space I'm going to want to have something this big. It means that I can backup not only everything I've got but years and years worth of history.

So configuring Time Machine is pretty easy. As a matter of fact if you plug in a new hard drive to your Mac it's probably going to prompt you asking if you want to use it for Time Machine. But even if it doesn't you can just go into System Preferences and then Time Machine. I already have a Time Machine backup going, of course. But if I didn't I could just select a disk for a new backup right here. I could say select this one and say Use Disk. One option I get is to encrypt backups. Do this if security is important to you. That means that if somebody were to steal your backup drive then all the data on it will be encrypted. It's less important for general users that are using their Macs at home and don't think that's going to be an issue. More important if you're bringing your backup with you on the road and you think it could be vulnerable to be stolen. Note that when you encrypt backup it's not really going to make that much difference day-to-day. But when you start the backup and do your initial backup it will take much longer. It will actually back everything up and then encrypt it and it could extend into days. But once you do that, really you don't see too much of a difference in time for it to encrypt backups. Of course, the other thing you need to remember is you will need to use a password to get into the encrypted backup. That's not an issue normally. Normally you just say encrypt the backup. Go ahead and use the disk and you're set. You never have to deal with it. But, if for instance, say your Mac were to disappear and you had the backup then you're going to need the password that you set to encrypt the backup in order to restore from that backup. 

Once you have it set you can return here to Time Machine in System Preferences. You've got backup automatically which you should definitely have turned on and also you can show Time Machine in Menu Bar which brings up this little menu here. There are also options. The only options you really have are to exclude items. So what might you want to exclude? Try not to exclude anything. So an example of something that you may not want backed up might be a folder of render files. Like you're a video editor and you know that there is basically the scratch space in a folder that the video editing software is using. You don't need that backed up. It's not your original clips. It's not the actual project files and it's not your finished project. It's just space that is used by the app and it could be a huge amount of space and you could add something like that here to save a little space. But for most users you wouldn't add anything to this. Just leave it alone and let it do everything by default. 

One thing that a lot of people ask is, well backing up automatically means that Time Machine backs up hourly. That's seems a bit much. Maybe I only want to backup everyday. Is there is a way to set it to everyday. The answer is NO. You want it to backup hourly. That's how Time Machine works. Backing up hourly if you haven't changed anything in that hour means that it won't really have anything to do. If you were to set it to a daily backup, say using other software, it might have a lot to do at the end of the day. So backing up hourly will divide up the backups over the course of the day and be less of an impact on you and also could save you if you have a problem. So using this Menu here you can look at the latest backup. See if everything is working. You could institute a backup now. So say if was backing up hourly but maybe it's 2:30 and you're quitting for the day and you want to shutdown your Mac because of power outages or something like that you could say, Backup Now, and let it backup right now instead of waiting until 3:00. You could also enter Time Machine, which I will show you in a minute. It's how you restore a file.

So let's take a look at using Time Machine to get back a file. Let's say I've got a document like this. This is a document I'm writing. Let's pretend this is a huge novel that is many pages long instead of just three sentences. But let's say I delete a couple of pages and I Save and I Close. Now let's go and open that document again. Here it is, and I've lost that. So you may think of Time Machine backups as something you can use in a disaster in case your machine is stolen or crashes or something happens to it. But you can use it to restore a file. So if I had deleted this file and I wanted it back I could use Time Machine to restore it. But also if I made a change to the file, since it's keeping incremental backups, I have the original version of this file. I have many versions kept everyday up until now and I have this current version of the file. I could use this to go back in time and restore a previous version of the file. Which is why it's called Time Machine. 

So here I am in my Documents folder and let's go into Time Machine here and it's going to go in this folder here and bring up the Time Machine interface which will show  this folder back in time and a timeline here as well. But let's go back in time here and I'm going to go back to earlier today. You could see in this preview here that bit that I want to get back is there! So it's in the previous version of the document. So I can hit now Restore here to restore this file. It's going to go back to the current time and it's going to ask me, do I want to keep the original or replace it with the older version or both. Let's say Keep Both. Now I've got the original. So I've got this document here and I've got the document with the old text in it that I thought I deleted and was gone forever. Now I can actually open this up and get this text back. So you can see how having an incremental backup is very important. If you just were to backup your entire Mac, say copy all your files from your Mac to a backup drive to make what's called a Clone then I would have just this file here with that paragraph missing. Or worse, if I were to delete these files and then make a clone of the drive it wouldn't include those files because I would have deleted them. So there would be nothing I could do to get those back. 

So there's a lot of versatility here using Time Machine. It works for all files. It will actually save all files. So even if it's a file that's outside of Apple software ecosystem, like say a PhotoShop file or something like that, Time Machine is going to backup that file. If you've changed that file everyday you'll have a copy of that file from everyday. You can go back three days ago and maybe get a layer from that PhotoShop file that you've since deleted. The way Time Machine works is it will keep the most recent version of every file that you've got and then it will keep previous versions of the file as the space allows. So if you have a 1TB drive in your Mac and you get a 5TB drive as a backup drive that gives a lot of space for everything you've got, which may be up to 1TB of data, plus 4TB of data to store previous versions of files. So the larger your drive the more previous versions you can store. If you work on video projects like me you could easily take up 100G just for a video file. So if I worked on a video file today it's 100G and I work on it again tomorrow I may have 2 copies. The previous version and the current version that are backed up to Time Machine and taking 200G up. So you can see how quickly I could run out of space on a 5TB drive. Which is why I've got a 16TB drive as my backup. Which is why I have a much larger drive as my backup drive. For me it's worth it. I want to make sure I have incremental backups going back as far as possible for the files that I'm working on. 

The other way to use Time Machine is simply if something happens to your Mac, like say it's destroyed or it fails in someway. If the drive fails or it's stolen you can then replace it with a new Mac, use your Time Machine backup. When you setup your new Mac it will ask you if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup. Simply connect the drive and it will take it from there. It's kind of automatic. It will read everything from the drive, put it back in its place and try to get that new machine looking just like your old machine with all your files exactly where they were, and all your settings exactly how they were before as well.