While enterprise-level backup options may offer robust solutions for workgroups, Apple’s Time Machine service is a great backup option to use for a single machine since it preserves the OS configuration along with all user data and applications. However, if you have used several Time Machine drives over time, you may find OS X suddenly showing Notification Center warnings that there have been no backups for a given number of days. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Time Machine
How to centralize your Time Machine backups
Time Machine in OS X offers a quick way to back up your entire system, but one requirement for this is you need to plug in your backup drive in order to keep the system backed up. For desktop systems this is a matter of simply keeping the drive attached and tucked away behind your iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Pro; however, if you are a MacBook owner, then you might find yourself periodically misplacing your drive, or not having it with you, and then getting messages that you haven’t backed up in a number of days. There are two easy approaches to help prevent this, especially if you have multiple Macs available. Continue reading
Address available hard drive space skyrocketing after installing OS X 10.10.3
An issue may occur on some Mac systems where after installing the OS X 10.10.3 update, the Finder and other services that report drive space may show an increasing level of available space. This may be accompanied by the Storage tab in the About This Mac window showing your hard drive’s space is being used only for backups.
In general, when this type of oddity appears in the About This Mac window, it suggests your drive’s Spotlight index needs to be rebuilt; however, this issue will likely survive a forced index rebuild. Continue reading
How to manually restore your Mail folder from Time Machine
If you have recently lost a large number of messages in OS X Mail, then provided you have a Time Machine backup of your system, you will have three options for restoring your messages. The first approach, since you can access Time Machine backups from within Mail, is to go to your mailbox in Mail and then invoke Time Machine and attempt to find and restore your messages from within the Mail interface; however, this is only practical for recovering a few messages, and in some cases this approach may simply not work. Continue reading
How to encrypt your Time Machine backups
When you enable FileVault on your Mac, you in effect prevent anyone from accessing your data without your password. Without encryption, someone can remove your Mac’s hard drive or boot to an alternative mode such as Target Disk mode and then access your data from another system; however, with encryption these efforts will be fruitless since your data is encrypted. This may be desired, but if you back up your Mac, then unless your backups are also encrypted you might undermine the purpose of using FileVault in the first place. Continue reading
How to restore files from Time Machine manually
Apple’s included Time Machine backup technology in OS X is a convenient and rather thorough way to make full-system backups of your Mac. It works by using multi-linked files on the backup drive to mirror unchanged data from a prior backup instance to a new one so both instances share the same data on disk. It then only copies changed data since the last backup, to the new backup instance. This approach allows Time Machine to create many snapshots of the entire system without any data redundancy on disk. Continue reading
How to back up your Mac
When using or troubleshooting your Mac, you may be eager to jump in and get to work; however, it is worth your while to ensure your system is properly backed up, especially if your work and data is important, or if you plan on making changes to the system in any way (e.g., installing software, or tweaking a system component).
There are several ways to back up your data on a Mac, with two that are the most recommended options. Continue reading