Time Machine backup drives

What should you use to back up your Mac? We find out...

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Everyone knows how important it is to make regular backups of your Mac's internal - and possibly external - drives, so if you're not doing them already, start today! Macs have a bundled backup system called Time Machine. This has been a part of OS X/macOS since 2007's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It's easy to set up, and it makes and keeps hourly backups for the last 24 hours, dally backups for a month and then weekly backups for anything older than a month. It keeps doing this until it runs out of space, and then it deletes the oldest weekly backup to make room for new backups. Time Machine backs up incrementally, that is, after the first time, it only backs up files that have changed or are new. Expect your first Time Machine backup to take quite a while, even as long as overnight, but after that, it's pretty quick, depending on how fast your backup drive is.

But where do you back up to? We strongly suggest you buy an external drive, and only use it for Time Machine. It's entirely possible to partition a drive and keep data on one partition and Time Machine on another, but if your drive fails you then lose both your data and your backups. Also, it's a good idea to buy as large a drive as you can afford. The bigger it is, the further back your backups will go.

If you have a desktop Mac or a notebook Mac that you don't take out of the house for long periods of time, we recommend a desktop hard drive - that is, one you have to plug into the mains as well as your Mac. These give the most capacity for your money. If you need to make backups while on the move, a portable drive is preferable.

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