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If your Mac forgets its manners and doesn't ask, you can select the drive for Time Machine to use by going to System Preferences > Time Machine and clicking the Select Disk button. Once you have a drive, plug it into your Mac and wait for the prompt to use it with Time Machine. The drive can either be connected directly to your Mac or to your network via an Apple Time Capsule, an external drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station or another router with an available USB port. For example, if your Mac has 256GB of storage, you'll want a 512GB drive.
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As far as how big of a drive to get, the unwritten rule is 1.5 to 2 times the size of your Mac's hard drive. You can find an external hard drive or SSD for relatively cheap, and we even have a handy guide to the best drives. Once the backup drive is full, it will make room by deleting the oldest backups. When Time Machine is set up, it will create and store one backup every hour for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and one backup a week for all previous months until it runs out of space. In fact, when you connect an external hard drive or SSD to your Mac, you may see a prompt asking if you want to use the drive with Time Machine.
Asking apple care to remove ssd when sending in mac for repair how to#
You don't have to do a thing after the initial setup process that takes just a few minutes.īelow I'll walk you through using Time Machine, cover how to check what iCloud is keeping a backup of and for those who want some extra assurance, I'll show you how to back up your Music library.Įvery Mac includes the Time Machine app that will routinely perform backups of your computer as long as it knows where to store that backup. The best part? Apple includes an app in every Mac that will routinely create a total backup of your Mac.
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