To use Time Machine to make a backup of your Mac, you need one of these types of storage devices:

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Time Machine is a great tool that automatically makes your Mac backups using one of the best external hard drives on the market. What's really great about it is that it's built into macOS itself, so every Mac comes with it automatically. Time Machine, new with Leopard, is an effortless way to back up everything on your Mac. You can go back in time to retrieve a file that was lost, damaged, or changed. To use Time Machine, you need to have an extra drive that’s big enough to store what’s on your computer. Time Machine pretty much takes over from there.

• External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac) or AirPort Time Capsule
  

If you need to reinstall macOS, do that before continuing. For example, if your Mac starts up to a. Time machine is a built-in, pre-installed backup program found on macOS or OSX. In this video, we show you how to setup your Time Machine backup as well as l. Time Machine Backup is a Mac computer’s excellent built-in backup tool. Once set up, it runs by itself in the background and keeps many versions of your data. As a result, you get the chance to undo not only accidental file deletions but also unwanted edits/changes to your files.

External drive connected to your Mac

Time Machine can back up to an external drive connected to a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire port on your Mac. If the disk isn't using the correct format, Time Machine will prompt you to erase it.

Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Machine over SMB

Many third-party NAS devices support Time Machine over SMB. For details, check the documentation for your NAS device.

Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination

To use another Mac on your network as a Time Machine backup destination, complete these steps on the other Mac:

1. Choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, then click Sharing.
2. From the list of services on the left, select File Sharing.
3. From the Shared Folders list on the right, click the add button (+), then choose a folder to use for Time Machine backups.
4. Control-click the folder that you added, then choose Advanced Options from the shortcuts menu that appears.
   
5. From the Advanced Options dialog, select “Share as a Time Machine backup destination.”

When setting up Time Machine on your other Mac computers, you should now be able to select the shared folder as a backup disk.

External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac) or AirPort Time Capsule

Time Machine can back up to an external USB drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac model) or AirPort Time Capsule.

1. Connect the drive directly to your Mac, then use Disk Utility to erase it.
2. Connect the drive to a USB port on your AirPort base station, then turn it on.
3. Open AirPort Utility, then select your base station and click Edit to view its settings.
4. Click the Disks tab in the settings window.
5. Select your backup disk from the list of partitions, then select “Enable file sharing”:
   
6. If more than one user on your network will back up to this disk with Time Machine, you can use the Secure Shared Disks pop-up menu to make sure that they can view only their own backups, not yours. Choose “With accounts” from the menu, then click the add button (+) to add users.
7. Click Update to restart your base station and apply the settings.

AirPort Time Capsule

Time Machine can back up to the built-in hard disk of an AirPort Time Capsule on your network.

Learn more

• Time Machine can't back up to a disk formatted for Windows, or to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

One of the things you'll love about your Mac – especially if you have recently switched from Windows – is Time Machine, the built-in backup feature. To use it you’ll need an external storage solution such as an external hard drive (or SSD) connected via the USB, Thunderbolt or FireWire port on your Mac, the Time Capsule or macOS server on your network, or the external hard drive connected to the AirPort Extreme base stations on your network. It is recommended that you back up before every major action, but as you start using the feature you'll see that you don't really need to back up your Mac on a daily basis. But that, of course, varies by user.

Understanding Mac’s Time Machine

Time Machine has its own scripts for housekeeping, but sometimes (such as when you see the “Time Machine could not complete the backup” error message) you may need to intervene to clean up space on your Time Machine drive. Space can always be saved on your backup if you delete junk, cache and temporary files before you back up the computer. That's particularly true if you haven't set up any exceptions in Time Machine preferences, and everything is saved, even applications.

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Since every external storage device has its own physical limits, if you are going to keep that drive in the long run then it's good to optimize your backups so that they occupy less space. For that it is possible to compress Time Machine backups, but before you start deleting and compressing backups you need to understand how Time Machine works.

Time Machine uses File System Event Store, a hidden log macOS keeps of changes made to the data on each HFS+ formatted drive or partition. But this won't list every file that has changed; instead, it will list the directories affected. Time Machine uses this log to find out what's changed and what needs to be backed up.

When Time Machine does the first backup, it copies everything (except trash and system work files) and creates a dated backup folder (year-month-day-hhmmss) in the Backups.backupdb folder, placing hard links in it to all the backup copies it has just made. Another dated backup folder is then created with the second backup, and this repeats each time. There is a trick, however: the second backup folder contains hard links to the items that remained unchanged.

Compressing Time Machine Backups

There are notable differences between the normal (or local) Backups.backupdb folder and a backup made over a network. Local backups are stored in a single Backups.backupdb folder at the top level of the external hard drive.

If you are backing up your Mac over a network (be it wired or wireless), you'll find the Backups.backupdb folder inside a container called a “sparse bundle disk image”. While it works just as well as the local backup version, an extra step is needed to actually recoup the space gained by deleting earlier backups due to its format. Unlike a normal folder or disk image, when you delete a file in a sparse bundle, it won't change the container size. To recoup the space, run the following command in Terminal (replacing the ‘Yourbackup’ entry with the necessary backup name):

% sudo su - root
% hdiutil compact /Volumes/TimeMachine/YourBackup.sparsebundle

What you’ll then see is:

Starting to compact…
Reclaiming free space…
……………………………………………
Finishing compaction…
Reclaimed X.X GB out of XXX.X GB possible.

Removing Old Time Machine Backups

Old backups can be removed in many ways, but here is the simplest.

1. Enter Time Machine.
2. Navigate to the backup you want to remove.
3. Right-click on the backup in the Finder window of Time Machine, and select Delete Backup.

Time Machine will prompt for the admin password and then delete the required file.
That's a bit clumsy if you want to delete multiple backups, so here's a Terminal command for this, which is very useful when deleting old backups:

tmutil delete /TimeMachine/Drive/Path/To/OldBackup/

Or, if you want to remove a backup from a specific date:

tmutil delete /Volumes/BackupDriveName/Backups.backupdb/MacComputerName/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS/

Deleting Old Time Machine Backups Automatically

If you don't mind speaking with your Mac via Terminal commands, then it’s even possible to automate the removal of old Time Machine backups by running the following batch script. Note that this will find the oldest and newest backups and display a prompt to delete the oldest, which then requires you to enter “Y” and the admin password to finish.


COMPUTER_NAME=$(/usr/sbin/scutil --get ComputerName)
NBACKUPS=$(/usr/bin/tmutil listbackups |
/usr/bin/grep '$COMPUTER_NAME' |
/usr/bin/wc -l)
OLDEST_BACKUP=$(/usr/bin/tmutil listbackups |
/usr/bin/grep '$COMPUTER_NAME' |
/usr/bin/head -n1)
LATEST_BACKUP=$(/usr/bin/tmutil latestbackup)
echo Latest backup: $LATEST_BACKUP
if [[ -n '$LATEST_BACKUP' && '$LATEST_BACKUP' != '$OLDEST_BACKUP' ]]then
echo -n '$NBACKUPS backups. Delete oldest: ${OLDEST_BACKUP##*/} [y/N]? '
read answer
case $answer in
y*)
echo Running: /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/tmutil delete '$OLDEST_BACKUP'
/usr/bin/sudo time /usr/bin/tmutil delete '$OLDEST_BACKUP'
;;
*)
echo No change
;;
esac
else
echo 'No backup available for deletion'
fi


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