If the drive fails when you need it, then it’s not worth even a penny. It doesn’t matter how fast the disk is, how sleek it looks, or how good the discount was on Amazon. The main factor in selection is reliability. There are certain qualities that I look for when considering hard drives for any backup. This is typical as there is a lot of data to backup on the first backup.Shop or Read Reviews on Amazon How to Choose Hard Drives for Time Machine Brand name The first backup will take a while, depending on your internet connection. Time Machine will now use your external drive to do automatic backups. As you can see from the picture below I have a 1TB external drive as well as a Time Capsule that I can use.Īfter you select your drive, click “Use for Backup.” Then, you are all set to go. You will want to select your external drive. Here you will be provided with a menu that shows the list of available drives that you can use Time Machine with. After this you are going to want to click on “Select Disk.” Then, you are going to want to click the Time Machine “on”. First, make sure your external drive is hooked into your Mac and that your Mac recognizes it. Here you will be able to set up your Time Machine and your external drive. If you do find it in your menubar, click on it, then click on “Open Time Machine Preferences.” Here you will find Time Machine and click on it there. If you don’t, you can always go to the Apple logo in the top left corner and click on it, then click on System Preferences. You should have a Time Machine icon in your menubar. I use a Western Digital external drive for the Mac and it is Time Machine compatible. One thing to note, is that you want to make sure that you have an external drive that is compatible with Time Machine. Being that I already had the two, this was the most cost effective for me. I looked at a lot of options, but none really made more sense to me than using Time Machine and an external drive. I knew that I had to start backing up my data. For me, I learned my lesson when my computer crashed a year ago.

And it really should be taken advantage of. Time Machine is a great utility for the Mac.

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