To customize your backup, open Time Machine preferences from the Time Machine menu, click 'Options,' then click + and select items you want to exclude.

The icons will tell you one of three statuses: Time Machine is backing up, idle until next automatic backup, or unable to complete the backup.

To review the status of a backup, go to the Time Machine menu.

To terminate an in-progress backup, go to the Time Machine menu and choose 'Skip This Backup' or 'Stop Backing Up.'.

If you choose to turn off automatic backups, you can still manually back up your Mac using 'Back Up Now.' In OS X El Capitan or earlier, you need to turn off Time Machine. For macOS Sierra or later, you can deselect Back Up Automatically.

To disable the automatic backups, open Time Machine preferences.

To backup immediately, go to the Time Machine menu and click 'Back Up Now.'.

Time Machine offers several ways for you to personalize your backups.

Once the disk is full, Time Machine automatically deletes the oldest backups. The program saves daily backups for a month and weekly backups for previous months. These include continuous hourly backups over a 24-hour period. Under 'Security Options' make sure to set the drive to write over past data three times or more.Īfter setting up Time Machine, the program automatically makes backups for you.MS-DOS (FAT) allows you to use Windows volumes of 32 GB or less.ĮxFAT allows you to use Windows volumes over 32 GB Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted) adds password and encryption protection to the partition while also including Mac formatting with case sensitive folder names. ('Backup' and 'backup' will be two different files.) Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) makes case-sensitive folders and Mac format. Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) adds a password and partition encryption to the Mac format. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) uses Mac formatting to protect data integrity A Format pop-up window will give you the opportunity to choose one of the following:.

Click 'Erase' from the Disk Utility options.Find your external hard drive in the list of drives.Open Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.Since most external hard drives are formatted for PCs, before the backup of your Mac begins you need to format the hard drive for macOS. Copying the files from your Mac to an external drive allows you to save data on your own terms.

Backup my mac with time machine