how to backup external hard drive time machine after setup

If your Time Machine backup drive dies - as hard drives eventually do - all of that data will be gone.Īre you interested in hard drive failure rates? So are we! You see, we use over 100,000 hard drives in our cloud data centers! Read our Hard Drive Reliability Stats to learn more. While Time Machine is great backup software, it’s not foolproof. The adage, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” is the reason. Use More than One Backup Disk Using Disk Rotationĭisk rotation is a technique borrowed from corporate IT professionals.

You also can use your Mac with more than one Time Machine backup drive. If you have a large disk, you can partition it and use part of it for regular data and part of it for a Time Machine backup. What is less well known is that you can use a single Time Machine backup drive with multiple Macs.

Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Machine over SMB.Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination.Time Capsule (See our post, What’s the Diff: Time Machine vs.External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac model) or AirPort.External drive connected to your Mac, such as a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire drive.Time Machine supports any of the following external storage devices. Which Storage Devices Can be used with Time Machine? For more on the difference between backups and archives, see our post, What’s the Diff: Backup vs Archive. That makes it great for backups, but not great for archives, which require long-term storage. The oldest backups get deleted when the drive fills up. Time Machine stores hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months for as much space as you have on your Time Machine backup drive. Get more details about Time Machine in our guide, How to Back Up Your Mac.

How to backup external hard drive time machine after setup