Manual Backup Mac Os X

The Mail Backup X is the long awaited solution to have the ability to backup Mails from both Online Service Providers and Email Clients for Mac users worldwide who feel responsible enough to back up their Macs. Backup & Restore Mails from Apple Mail, Outlook Mac, Office 365 for Mac, Thunderbird, Postbox as and when they arrive. Mail Backup X. Time Machine is an easy Mac backup solution built into Mac OS X that allows for automated continual backups of files, apps, and the operating system itself. Not only does Time Machine make it incredibly easy to maintain frequent automatic backups of a Mac, it also makes it equally simple to restore. How to Automatically Backup Apple Mail / Mac Mail Mailbox Data on Mac OS X? You are an Apple Mac / MacBook user and have concerns about how to automatically back-up / Archive e-mail on your Mac Desktop / Laptop. How to Back Up Your Computer with Time Machine. Mac macOS (10.5 and above) has an excellent built-in backup tool called Time Machine. Once you plug in a hard drive and set up Time Machine, it will work automatically in the background, continuously saving copies of all your files, applications, and system files (i.e., most everything except for the stuff you likely don’t need to back up, such. If you don’t have a second hard drive, the most rudimentary way to back up your Mac with Mac OS X Lion is to do it manually. You would accomplish this by dragging said files, a few at a time, to another volume — a CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW.

You can use Time Machine, the built-in backup feature of your Mac, to automatically back up all of your files, including apps, music, photos, email, documents, and system files. When you have a backup, you can restore files from your backup if the original files are ever deleted from your Mac, or the hard disk (or SSD) in your Mac is erased or replaced.

Create a Time Machine backup

To create backups with Time Machine, all you need is an external storage device. After you connect the device and select it as your backup disk, Time Machine automatically makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when your backup disk is full.

Connect an external storage device

Connect one of the following external storage devices, sold separately. Learn more about backup disks that you can use with Time Machine.

  • External drive connected to your Mac, such as a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire drive
  • External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac model) or AirPort Time Capsule
  • AirPort Time Capsule
  • Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination
  • Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Machine over SMB

Select your storage device as the backup disk

When you connect an external drive directly to your Mac, you might be asked if you want to use the drive to back up with Time Machine. Select Encrypt Backup Disk (recommended), then click Use as Backup Disk.

An encrypted backup is accessible only to users with the password. Learn more about keeping your backup disk secure.

If Time Machine doesn't ask to use your drive, follow these steps to add it manually:

  1. Open Time Machine preferences from the Time Machine menu in the menu bar. Or choose Apple () menu > System Preferences, then click Time Machine.
  2. Click Select Backup Disk (or Select Disk, or Add or Remove Backup Disk):
  3. Select your external drive from the list of available disks. Then select ”Encrypt backups” (recommended) and click Use Disk:
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If the disk you selected isn't formatted as required by Time Machine, you're prompted to erase the disk first. Click Erase to proceed. This erases all information on the backup disk.

Enjoy the convenience of automatic backups

After you select a backup disk, Time Machine immediately begins making periodic backups—automatically and without further action by you. The first backup may take a long time, depending on how many files you have, but you can continue using your Mac while a backup is underway. Time Machine backs up only the files that changed since the previous backup, so future backups will be faster.

To start a backup manually, choose Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu in the menu bar. Use the same menu to check the status of a backup or skip a backup in progress.

Learn more

  • If you back up to multiple disks, you can switch disks before entering Time Machine. Press and hold the Option key, then choose Browse Other Backup Disks from the Time Machine menu.
  • To exclude items from your backup, open Time Machine preferences, click Options, then click the Add (+) button to add an item to be excluded. To stop excluding an item, such as an external hard drive, select the item and click the Remove (–) button.
  • If using Time Machine to back up to a network disk, you can verify those backups to make sure they're in good condition. Press and hold Option, then choose Verify Backups from the Time Machine menu.
  • In OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later, you can start up from your Time Machine disk, if necessary. Press and hold Option as your Mac starts up. When you see the Startup Manager screen, choose “EFI Boot” as the startup disk.

OS X Mavericks allows you to manually back up your Mac. If you’re too cheap to buy a second hard drive, the most rudimentary way to back up is to do it manually.

You accomplish this by dragging said files a few at a time to another volume — a CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW. (If you use an optical disc, don’t forget to actually burn the disc; merely dragging those files onto the optical-disc icon won’t do the trick.)

By using this method, you’re making a copy of each file that you want to protect.

Yuck! If doing a manual backup sounds pretty awful— it is. This method can take a long, long time, you can’t really tell whether you’ve copied every file that needs to be backed up, and you can’t really copy only the files that have been modified since your last backup. Almost nobody in his right mind sticks with this method for long.

Of course, if you’re careful to save files only in your Documents folder, you can probably get away with backing up only that.

Or if you save files in other folders within your Home folder or have any files in your Movies, Music, Pictures, or Sites folders (which often contain files you didn’t specifically save in those folders, such as your iPhoto photos and iTunes songs), you should probably consider backing up your entire Home folder.

Backing up your Home folder is even easier if you use special backup software.

How to back up by using commercial backup software

Another way to back up your files is with a third-party backup program. Backup software automates the task of backing up, remembering what’s on each backup disc (if your backup uses more than one disc), and backing up only files that have been modified since your last backup.

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Furthermore, you can instruct your backup software to back up only a certain folder (Home or Documents) and to ignore the hundreds of megabytes of stuff that make up OS X, all of which you can easily reinstall from the OS X Install DVD.

Your first backup with commercial software might take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours and use one or more optical discs — CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, magneto-optical disc — or nonoptical media, such as another hard drive or any kind of tape backup. Subsequent backups, called incremental backups in backup-software parlance, should take only a few minutes.

Manual Backup Mac Os X 2

If you do incremental backups with optical discs, be sure to label and number all the discs you use during that operation. Your backup software may prompt you with a message such as Please insert backup disk 7. If you haven’t labeled your media clearly, you could have a problem figuring out which disc is disc 7 or which disc 7 belongs to that particular backup set.

One of the best things about good backup software is that you can set it up to automate your backups and perform them even if you forget. And although Time Machine is a step in the right direction and might be sufficient for your needs, it’s not good enough for me.

Why You Need Two Sets of Backups

You’re a good soldier. You back up regularly. You think you’re immune to file loss or damage.

Now picture yourself in the following scenario:

You leave the office one day for lunch. When you return, you discover that your office has been burglarized, struck by lightning, flooded, burned to the ground, or buried in earthquake rubble — take your pick.

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Alas, while you did have a backup, the backup disk was in the same room as your Mac, which means it was either stolen or destroyed along with your Mac.

Manual Backup Mac Os X

This scenario is totally unlikely — but it could happen, and it does demonstrate why you need multiple backups. If you have several sets of backup disks, and don’t keep them all in the same room as your Mac, chances are pretty good that one of the sets will work even if the others are lost, stolen, or destroyed.