Backing up your Mac is simple and important. We recommend it for everyone.
Back up with Time Machine
Jun 22, 2013 This option on boot trick works for quite literally any boot volume, whether it’s an external USB drive of any sort, a Thunderbolt hard drive, boot DVD, CD, the Recovery partition, even in dual-boot environments with other versions of OS X, or a Linux or a Windows partition with Boot Camp, if it’s bootable and connected to the Mac it will be visible at this boot manager.
Time Machine is the built-in backup feature of your Mac. It’s a complete backup solution, but you can use other backup methods as well.
Create a backupStore files in iCloud
You can also use iCloud and iCloud Drive to store files, such as your photos, documents, and music.
Set up iCloud and iCloud DriveRestore your Mac from a backup
When you have a backup, you can use it to restore your files at any time, including after the original files are deleted from your Mac.
Restore from a backupPrepare your Mac for service
Making a backup is an important part of preparing your Mac for service, especially because some types of repair might require erasing or replacing your hard drive.
Get your Mac ready for serviceHow much space do I need for a backup?
To see the size of a specific file or folder, click it once and then press Command-I. To see storage information about your Mac, click the Apple menu in the top-left of your screen. Choose About This Mac and click the Storage tab. For Time Machine backups, it's good to use a drive that has at least twice the storage capacity of your Mac.
Related topics
Free up storage on your Mac
macOS can save space by storing your content in the cloud. This isn't a backup, but it includes new tools to make it easier to find and remove large or unwanted files before you make a backup.
Use Optimized Storage in macOSErase or format a storage device
You can use Disk Utility if you need to erase or format a storage device.
Learn how to use Disk UtilitymacOS Community
If you can't back up your Mac
We'll find the best support options for you.
Backup To External Hard Drive
To prevent the loss of all your data if your Mac’s hard drive should suddenly bite the dust, you can connect an external hard drive to your Mac’s USB or Thunderbolt port with a cable that’s typically included with the hard drive.
USB and Thunderbolt ports connect peripherals to a computer. USB ports commonly connect a mouse, printer, or digital camera. Thunderbolt connects a display or storage device. The main advantage of using external hard drives is that copying large files is much faster and more convenient than copying the same files to CDs or DVDs.
Additionally, external hard drives are easy to unplug from one Mac and plug into another Mac; plus, only one of the newest Mac models even has an optical disc drive.
You can also put an external hard drive on your network. For example, Apple’s Time Capsule provides external storage and functions as a Wi-Fi hub so multiple computers can back up to the Time Capsule. (There are 2TB and 3TB (terabyte) versions, so you probably won’t have to worry about storage space.) Any networked drive must use Apple File Protocol (AFP) file sharing.
Perhaps the biggest drawback of using external hard drives is that they can’t protect against a catastrophe near your computer, such as a fire burning down your house or a flood soaking your computer desk and office. If a disaster wipes out the entire area around your computer, your external hard drive may be wiped out in the catastrophe as well.
You can treat an external hard drive as just another place to copy your files, but for greater convenience, you should use a special backup application, such as Time Machine. Backup applications can be set to run according to a schedule (for example, to back up your files every night at 6 p.m.)
If the files haven’t changed since the last time you backed them up, the backup application saves time by skipping over those files rather than copying the same files to the external hard drive again.
Backup Macos To External Hard Drive
To retrieve files, you could just copy the files from your external hard drive back to your original hard drive — but be careful! If you changed a file on your original hard drive, copying the backup copy can wipe out the most recent changes and restore an old file to your hard drive, which probably isn’t what you want.
External Backup Drive For Mac
To keep you from accidentally wiping out new files with older versions of that same file, backup applications always compare the time and date a file was last modified to make sure that you always have copies of the latest file.