How to Back Up Your Mac With Time Machine

One great feature of the Macintosh OS is the ability to quickly and easily back up your Mac to an external drive so that if there's ever a problem you can restore quickly. Here's how you can use Time Machine to back up your system and restore it.

1. Open System Preferences and choose “Time Machine.”

2. Select a disk to back up to by clicking “Select Disk...”

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3. Choose the disk to back up to and click “Use Disk.” For more security, click the “Encrypt backups” checkbox.

4. Click “Options...” and add any folders you don't want backed up. It's a good idea to remove external drives that are not always attached and temporary folders or files that take up a lot of space.

5. Slide the button to On to start backing up your disk.

How to Restore from a Backup

1. Navigate to “Enter Time Machine” from the menu bar.

2. Select the directory and time you want to restore from and click “Restore” in the lower right.

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Jennifer Kyrnin has been building websites since 1995, and teaching others how to do it since 1997. She's written several books on the topic, and is probably working on another one right now. And she does it all on her beloved iMac and sometimes her MacBook Air.