How to set up Time Machine to back up your Mac
Plug in an external hard drive, go to System Settings → General → Time Machine, and click 'Select Backup Disk'. Choose your drive and Time Machine starts backing up immediately. It runs automatically every hour after that.
Time Machine is macOS's built-in backup tool. It saves every file on your Mac automatically every hour. If anything goes wrong—corrupted files, accidental deletion, hard drive crash—you can restore from a Time Machine backup. It's that simple.
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- If your drive isn't recognized by Time Machine or backups keep failing, contact us and we can check if your drive needs formatting or has driver compatibility issues.
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