Time Machine For Mac – What Is It All About?

Backups are always necessary and there needs to be some way of keeping your important stuff safe. Some backup options can, however, outweigh others with their long list of benefits.

These benefits could be in terms of what is backed up, how often it is backed up and where it is backed up. And if you are a Mac user, among all the options available for Mac backups, you’d like to use the built in Time Machine feature of your Mac for taking regular backups of all your important stuff. Let’s get into details of what Time Machine backups are all about.

What Is Time Machine And How It Works?

As mentioned earlier, Time Machine is your Mac’s built-in backup feature. It backs up everything on your Mac to some external drive allowing you to restore your stuff anytime you need it. Or, even, take a look at the previous copies of the files.
All you have to do is to set it up on your Mac and specify an external drive that you’d like to take Mac backup on. And, once you have set it up, Time Machine will automatically start backing up everything on your Mac. After a complete initial backup, it sticks to some type of schedule and keeps hourly, daily and weekly backups as long as there is enough space available on your backup disk. And, when you run out of space, it deletes the earliest backups to create more space for new backups.


What Potential Benefits You Get To Enjoy With Time Machine Backups?

Time Machine backs up your files to your designated location. It could be anything like an external drive, a second internal drive on your Mac, some network server, a partition on the internal disk drive, or even Apple’s Time Capsule. Here are some of the potential benefits that you get to enjoy by using Time Machine with your Mac.

It Produces Many Backups Effortlessly

Time Machine takes hourly backups of your machine and with each of these backups, it takes a snapshot of the entire system state at that point. Taking a look at the folders on the backup disk will reveal that you have a complete clone of your files on Mac for each of the different backup sessions. However, it’s type of an illusion; in every backup that Time Machine takes, it copies only the files that have changed from the previous backup. Time Machine also uses hard links for keeping just a single copy of some file and makes it to appear in various places at a time. So, it means that the disk doesn’t really fills up with several copies featuring same content.

Though it takes hourly backups throughout each day, but then deletes the older versions for saving space. It can be a reliable option if you are looking to have daily backups for all the days in the month, backup of every week and then backup of every month of the year. So, in short, Time Machine gives you access to data backups at different points in time and shows you how your files on the Mac looked like at any given instant.

Quick And Easy Process For Restoring Files

Time Machine makes it simple and easy for you to restore files from backups. All you have to do is to click Time Machine in Dock and use timeline to go to earlier views of something on your Mac to locate the one you want to restore. Click the Restore button and you are done. It’s as simple as that!

Restoring Entire Disk Is Also Possible

Another great thing about Time Machine is that it allows you to restore entire disk state for any given point in time. No matter what changes you might have made on your Mac afterwards, everything will go back to the state that you want to restore. Though the process is a bit time-consuming, it is very much possible. And such restores include restoring OSX itself to the state at a certain point in time.

Time Machine Can Use Network Volume If Setup That Way

You can setup Time Machine in a way that allows it to backup several Macs at your office or home to a single disk. You must be running Leopard on your Macs for having such functionality, however.

Runs Both Automatically And Manually

Even though many people like to cut the hassle by setting up Time Machine for automatic backups, there is a manual backup option available as well. And if you are not comfortable with that hourly backup scheme of Time Machine then you can simply specify your own schedule and take manual backups according to that. But remember, you’ll have to initiate a backup every time you want Time Machine to do that for you.

So, Time Machine is quite a handy option for Mac users to make sure that they never lose their precious data. It is important to understand how it actually works so that any issues can be avoided completely in the first place. But, all in all, it’s a perfect solution to keep most up-to-date backups of your Mac in a safe location.

Author Bio:

James Barrett is a passionate writer who writes mostly about tech with a focus on Apple’s products, news and reviews. Currently, he’s a contributing author at ApplePit.