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How to Back Up a Mac (Built-in Tools First)

Time Machine has been on your Mac the whole time, and the setup takes about a minute. What the built-in backup does well, the five places it stops, and the three checks that catch the copy people assume they have.

Lisa Tan ·

What Time Machine does, in four steps

macOS ships with a backup tool, and setting it up takes about a minute. Open System Settings, choose General, then Time Machine, and click Add Backup Disk. An external drive over USB or Thunderbolt is the usual answer, and a folder on a network volume works too. Tick Encrypt Backups before the first copy runs, then leave Back Up Automatically switched on so the schedule never depends on your memory.

Keep the Time Machine item in the menu bar. It shows when the last backup finished and adds a Back Up Now command, and it's the button worth reaching for before you do something reckless to a folder.

The first pass copies everything and runs for hours on a full drive. Every pass after that is incremental: the Mac writes what's changed since the last one. Apple's schedule is hourly for the past day, daily for the past month, and weekly for the months before that. When the backup disk fills up, the oldest versions are deleted to make room.

Open Options before the first run. That list is where folders get excluded, and it earns its place. A build directory, a folder of installers you never reopen, or the cache of a program you stopped using will otherwise sit inside every version you keep.

What actually lands on the backup disk

Since Big Sur, a Time Machine backup no longer carries macOS itself. What it carries is your data: your home folder, your documents and projects, the apps you installed, and the settings that go with them. The system comes back from Recovery, the files come back from the drive, and that's the order Apple's own recovery instructions give.

Three things pass through the backup without leaving anything behind.

  • Work that only exists in a browser tab. A document that lives on a server isn't a file, so there's nothing local to copy. The report stays green while that work stays outside.
  • Files iCloud has offloaded. Switch on Optimize Mac Storage and macOS removes the local copy of anything you haven't opened lately, leaving a placeholder behind. A placeholder is a fine thing to back up and a useless thing to restore.
  • Folders you excluded. That build directory you skipped to save space is a decision you will meet again the day you need it.

Two more absences are worth naming while you're here: the account on the other computer in the house, and everything on your phone.

A restore starts with a reinstall

This is the part that catches people mid-emergency. On a Mac with Apple silicon, you shut down, hold the power button until the startup options appear, and go into Recovery. On Intel, you restart and hold Command-R. macOS gets installed first, and Migration Assistant offers to bring your data back from the Time Machine disk during setup.

The recovery therefore has to be possible from somewhere other than the machine that failed. The backup disk, whatever cable it needs, and the password for an encrypted backup all have to be within reach of somebody who isn't that machine. Write the encryption password down, and keep the note somewhere a fire can't reach in the same trip it reaches the drive.

Two more built-in routes

Time Machine is the long history. Two smaller habits cover the gaps it leaves.

The manual copy is the first. Drag the folder you can't lose onto a second disk, one that stays unplugged the rest of the week, and you have a copy that a stray deletion on the main drive can't touch. For anything sensitive, Disk Utility will build an encrypted container instead: File, New Image, Image from Folder, 256-bit encryption, and the folder becomes a single locked file you can carry.

The second is Migration Assistant itself. It's the same tool the recovery route uses, pointed at another computer rather than at a disk.

Five places the built-in backup stops

  • It cannot copy what was never a file. The browser-only document and the offloaded placeholder look identical to a healthy backup: present in the report, absent in the restore.
  • Recovery is a project rather than a button. Reinstall first, restore second, with a disk and a password in the room. That's manageable on a quiet afternoon and miserable at 11pm before a flight.
  • History is finite, and the size of the drive decides how finite. A backup disk that's barely larger than the storage it copies keeps a short memory, quietly, while the oldest versions leave.
  • Nothing checks whether the copy is real. An exclusion, a placeholder and a genuine file produce the same healthy line in the menu bar. The only honest test is opening something from the drive, which is a habit rather than a feature.
  • Keys don't travel in the backup. A password-locked vault or an encrypted journal comes back as ciphertext, and ciphertext without its password is noise. The lock arrives with the backup; the key stays with you.

There's also the matter of where the drive lives. A backup that sits on the same desk as the computer shares its fate with a burst pipe, a theft, or a power surge. One copy in another building is the difference between an inconvenience and a loss, and the cheapest version of that is a second drive you rotate out of the house once a week.

When the built-ins aren't enough

DiskBrew answers the question a backup needs answered first: what is actually on this drive. It draws the disk as rings you drill into, so the folder eating 40 GB announces itself instead of hiding three levels down. It's built for exactly this moment, and the app's own pitch lists trimming the dead weight before a backup or a move. A smaller source folder is a backup that finishes on time.

AwakeBean covers the first backup, which is the one that runs for hours. It keeps sleep off on a timer, from fifteen minutes to five hours or any number you type, and it can switch itself on whenever a chosen app is running. Set it, close the lid on a plugged-in Mac, and the copy finishes overnight instead of stalling.

DripCleaner clears the caches and forgotten folders first, which is how a backup stops carrying the same junk in every version it stores. It runs on macOS and Windows and deletes nothing until you say so.

Then there are the files whose whole point is that they're locked. A PrivateMedia vault, a SteepJournal diary and a PassBrew key database all belong in the backup, and all three come back as ciphertext. PassBrew is the friendliest of the three in a recovery, because the .kdbx file it writes opens in any KeePass-compatible reader on any platform. That's what makes a format a good citizen of a backup: another program, on another machine, can open it.

For the copy that needs to live somewhere else, FileShipper moves a file to your phone in a few seconds over your own network, with no account and nothing uploaded to a server in between. It's free on the menu, and it's the fastest way I know to turn one copy into two while I'm still in the room.

The checks that catch the boring failures

Twice a year I run three checks, on a day with nothing else in it. The disk gets mounted on a machine that isn't the one it protects, and I read a folder from it to prove the files are really there. Then the harder one: I pick a file I'd hate to lose, copy it to an empty folder, and open it. Finally I check that the drive is encrypted, and I make sure I can still find that password without the Mac.

Ten minutes, three checks, and what they catch is never dramatic: the excluded folder, the placeholder, the forgotten password, the drive that quietly stopped. Those are the ones that turn into a story about losing two years of work.

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