Mac Time Machine Backup To External Hard Drive

  1. How To Backup Mac To External Hard Drive Without Time Machine 2018
  2. Thunderbolt External Hard Drive Mac

How to Backup MacBook Air/Pro/iMac to External Hard Drive with Time Machine

Time Machine is a built-in tool on Mac, which works with internal and external disk drives to backup and restore data for macOS. It's one of the easiest way to save your Mac data to SSD or HDD, including mac apps, media files, DVD backup, documents and other. Follow Mac backup steps with Time Machine below. You have to format your new external hard drive for Mac before backup.

Mac

You don’t need to transfer your backups to use Time Machine with another Mac. If you want to back up a second Mac to your external drive, you can do it alongside your existing Time Machine backups. There’s no need to clear out the drive and start from scratch. Simply connect it to a new Mac and tell Time Machine to use it for backups.

Step 1: Connect external hard drive to Mac via USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt or so, and a message will pop up, asking whether you want to use the drive to back up with Time Machine. Click 'Use as Backup Disk'. You can check the box 'Encrypt Backup Disk' and enter password to encrypt the portable hard drive.

  • I have a WDC Passport external drive which I used as a time machine backup. However, I do not want to use it as Time Machine backup anymore, I just want to use it as a regular external hard drive. How can I do this? Whenever I run the Disk Utility App, I can't seem to find a way to reformat the external drive back to FAT32.
  • Fortunately, Time Machine can back up any locally connected drive, although Apple configures it by default to excludes external drives. If you have a Mac Pro or another system that you’ve.
  • How to back up your Mac with Time Machine. We have a step-by-step guide to backing up with Time Machine here, but essentially you just need to do the following. Plug in hard drive or SSD.
  • Your external hard drive should at least be the same size as your Mac's internal drive. Check out our list of best external hard drive for Mac.
  • If you don't see this message, click Apple menu > System Preferences and select Time Machine, click 'Select Backup Disk' and select the external hard drive for Mac backup on the list, and click Use Disk.
  • You external hard drive should be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If you formatted it as Windows format other improper formats, you have to erase and reformat the external hard drive with Disk Utility. If so, back up your current data on the external storage device as reformatting will erase all the data.
  • Time Machine will use up all the storage on the external hard drive. If you don't want the backup take up all the space on the drive and need to store other data on this drive, follow to partition external hard drive on Mac with Time Machine.

How To Backup Mac To External Hard Drive Without Time Machine 2018

Backup

Step 2: Check the box 'Back Up Automatically' and Time Machine will auto backup your Mac computer. Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month or weekly backups for all previous months, and the oldest backups will be deleted when the external hard drive has no free space. Learn how to free up disk space on Mac.

Apple time machine backup external hard drive

Thunderbolt External Hard Drive Mac

  • Click Time Machine menu, you can start your Mac data backup now without waiting for auto backup.
  • Turn off Time Machine to stop backing up, or deselect Backup Automatically under Time Machine preferences on macOS Sierra to disable Time Machine. You can select Skip This Backup to cancel backup procedure.
  • Go to TimeMachine preferences under the Time Machine menu, click Options, '+' icon and select any item you want to exclude from this backup.