How to Use Time Machine to Backup Your Entire Mac OS X Hard Drive

Robbie Ferguson: When you talk about doing like a whole backup of your entire drive, so the first time that you run, it’s going to backup the entire drive. And then well after that, it just does incremental backups so like how— Tyler Steingard: Exactly, yeah. Robbie Ferguson: How much time would we be looking at for that first backup? Tyler Steingard: I don’t know. It depends on how big your system is and what all your applications you have setup, right? Robbie Ferguson: Yeah. Tyler Steingard: I believe my initial backup took a couple hours I think. Robbie Ferguson: And something went backwards since then? Tyler Steingard: And depending to some people, from what I understand some people just do it overnight you know, you just set it up to go and you go to bed, you come back in the morning and out of the box it does an hourly snapshot but I’ll show you later. I’ve done that thing to overwrite that. Robbie Ferguson: Okay. Tyler Steingard: Because I prefer to just do a daily backup. Robbie Ferguson: Is that going to affect performance if you allow that to run every hour? Tyler Steingard: It depends on how much RAM again you have. For me, I just—there is this thing in the back of my head that says, “I need as much RAM as possible. So, you know, I need as much memory as possible.” So I just—I personally prefer to just go, you know everyday at 05:15 because I typically end around five and it’s just does a wrap up. Robbie Ferguson: Yeah. Tyler Steingard: Yeah exactly. Robbie Ferguson: Okay. Tyler Steingard: And the nice thing about it is that, when it does start running, it shows up in your—I’ll actually start one right now. There is you. Robbie Ferguson: I try to make a funny face if I wasn’t. Tyler Steingard: There is any menu bar up in the top right. There is the Time Machine icon and you just hit that and it says the latest backup was today at 06:50 and you can just hit Back Up Now, so you can overwrite that automation and as you can see, there is just a bit of an animation there of it just spinning. Robbie Ferguson: Yup. Tyler Steingard: So, you know, it’s doing something. The clock is going in reverse so it’s just making a snapshot. Robbie Ferguson: Cool. Tyler Steingard: Also, in your finder, where your volume that you’re actually backing up too, it is also doing this sort of animation just to kind of let you know what’s going on. Robbie Ferguson: Right. So, when you actually setup like where it is told to the save the backup to? Like is that like the first time you plug-in the drive, it’s going to ask you? Tyler Steingard: Yeah exactly. If you have never setup Time Machine before then what it will do is, it will come up with your System Preferences and just say, it’s found a new device, you don’t have Time Machine setup yet, so do you wan to take advantage of this volume to be your backup volume. Robbie Ferguson: Okay, cool. So, it’s pretty user- friendly. Tyler Steingard: After the fact. Robbie Ferguson: As far that goes. Tyler Steingard: Oh yeah, it’s super user friendly. I was really impressed when I first got in into Leopard. So, if I’ll just quickly show you in my System Preferences, there is a Time Machine Preference Panel and in there, there is nice big Time Machine logo. You can actually turn it off with this giant switch, so I don’t know why you’d wan to but if you wanted yank your drive out or whatever and— Robbie Ferguson: I can just click that, I’m going to hear— Tyler Steingard: Yeah exactly. I kind of wonder if there is a little audio thing there because I’ve never actually done it before but it would be funny if there’s kind of like that—that scene in ghost busters where they turn off the big machine that holds up the ghost and then just say— Robbie Ferguson: Alright. Okay, we’ll take—let’s take about five minutes Tyler and just kind of zip through Time Machine and there was another backup software that you wanted to look at as well. Just so that we can have an idea especially for those Mac users and of course, if you’re watching this in the chat room, this is Category 5 Technology TV. We’re online at www.catergory5.tv. We’re talking today to our resident correspondent with regards to Mac Data backups, Tyler Steingard is joining us from Barrie, Ontario. And if you have any questions, Carrie is standing by in the chat room category5.tv. She is ready to ask Tyler your question, so I just get on over there. Category5.tv, take it away Tyler. Tyler Steingard: Thanks. So, yeah. I was just that going through with the System Panel here for Time Machine. I was saying earlier that as soon as you plug in your other, if it’s an external hard drive or if you have a Mac Pro and you’ve plugged-in more hard drives into another bay for instance and when you first boot up, it will say, “Hey do you want to use this as a Time Machine thing” and if you say yes, it will just start going right to work. After that, in your System Preferences, you’ll see the actual disk that’s being utilized, so I just named my disk TimeBacker. And then it tells you how much that disk is and how much is available left on it. So, the oldest backup I have is from April 2008 and that should be a complete backup of my system and now the latest backup is, the one I just ran moments ago. That is just a snapshot of anything I changed since you know, 05:00 today when I automatically went. And then it tells me that the next schedule backup is an hour from now. And that was just a default thing. I am not going to really—I believe that the system that I used to overwrite that default doesn’t actually take that thing there. So, if I just go and unlock these preferences here, then I can actually get in this more options. Sorry, I am messing around with some things here. Robbie Ferguson: Not that I’ve ever done that Tyler, not at all. Tyler Steingard: I don’t have as fancy of a setup as you do Robbie, so thanks on the seamless. Robbie Ferguson: Mine is pretty fancy. Pretty fancy, if you’re watching back there you know Tyler Steingard: What’s that? Robbie Ferguson: Go ahead, sorry, go ahead Tyler. Tyler Steingard: Sure. So, in order to get into some more advanced settings, you have to unlock. As an Administrator, you have to unlock some of these settings because the user account that I am currently isn’t in Admin user but I now, I could actually go ahead and change the disk if I wanted to. I have another hard drive plugged-in right now. I could go ahead and use that volume. It has some other files on it right now; some video production files. So, I believe it would just leave those alone and it would create another folder and go through as a separate sort of thing on that drive. In my Options, I can tell my Time Machine not to backup certain things. I can tell it not to backup certain folders. I don’t know what I would not want to backup to be honest. So, if I take a look my home folder, let’s say, so under my places, thing I drop that down and I have my Desktop and then my home folder and if I go into my home folder and I go, let’s say Documents and I say, “Oh shoot! I just deleted this pdf.” There I just deleted it and where did it go? I don’t know. Let’s go in the Time Machine. So, I can just go up to the corner here and I can actually go to Enter Time Machine. If I just click that, it zooms me into this world of it’s own and just takes me right down at the Mac OS X but at least the finder window and on the side, on the right hand side here, you’ll see almost back dated timeline that you could just quickly zoom back to Thursday July 22nd, it will—I can’t actually zoom that that far because I don’t have backups from that far on this actual login on this user. Robbie Ferguson: So, you can actually jump back to the backup that happened ten minutes ago and then recover that file that’s deleted. Tyler Steingard: Exactly. Robbie Ferguson: So, very similar to what we’re looking at last week with back in time on Linux but with a fancier GUI and really nice interface. Tyler Steingard: That’s right. So, all I have to do is click; there is an arrow on the bottom right hand corner. Robbie Ferguson: Yup. Tyler Steingard: And if I just click that arrow, it will go back to a time when that pdf was actually existed. Robbie Ferguson: Okay. Tyler Steingard: In that folder. Robbie Ferguson: Very nice. Carrie Webb: Wow. Tyler Steingard: So well, if I had changed that pdf, it would also go back in time to the point where I’d last saved that pdf prior to the current save. You know, if I accidentally, instead of pressing Save As when I was creating another document, then just hit Save and I accidentally overwrote all the previous things that I’d done. I’ve actually done this before and this has saved my butt. There is big button in the bottom corner that is simply says Restore. Robbie Ferguson: Okay. Tyler Steingard: I’ll just hit that and it brings the file back into present day. Robbie Ferguson: As long as right in there. Tyler Steingard: And there it is. Robbie Ferguson: Very nice. Tyler Steingard: There is my pdf. Carrie Webb: He just went back in time people. Robbie Ferguson: Amazing. Tyler Steingard: That’s right.