Living in NSW makes you think about what would happen if you needed to evacuate your home and leave your computer behind. What would happen to your data? Could the data be recovered from fire damage or flood damage? The answer to both of those questions is YES! However, the process is very expensive and the last thing you want to be doing is arguing with your insurance company to cover the cost of data recovery. Here is an important Time Machine FAQ.
Time Machine FAQ
Yes! Most of the time Time Machine will walk you though the process of setting it up the first time. Process takes about five minutes.
Expect the first backup to take at least a few hours. However after that updates to the backup only takes a few minutes.
By default Time Machine backs up all files on your Apple Computer including photos, Videos , Documents, Email and Applications.
Time Machine Backs up every hour that the designated hard drive is connected to your Apple Computer.
All applications slow down your computer however you will not notice a speed difference when the time machine is backing up your Mac.
If your Mac is getting slow during a backup there is something else wrong with your computer. This makes it even more important to back up your computer! Your drive might be failing. BACK UP NOW!
No. Once you reconnect your external drive to your Macbook Air the time machine backup will start automatically
Honestly, all hard drives are compatible with Apple Computers. The dive will need to be reformatted. Lucky for you Time Machine will offer to do this for you when you first set it up.
I recommend at least twice the size of the internal drive of your computer. For current MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros this should not be a problem … Overall Bigger the external hard drive the better.
Yes you can have more than one backup stored on the same hard drive. However make sure it is a big one! Also do not forget to back up all your computers.
No it is not .. If you need to have a bootable backup I recommend using Disk Utility to create a Disk Image. A Disk Image is not a good replacement for Time Machine Backups.
Everything can fail .. however, in the past 15 years of being an Apple Computer Repair Technician, I have never had a problem restoring from a Time Machine backup from a working Hard Drive.
I recommend not going into any database files as they are not meant for us humans to directly understand. However if you “Enter Time Machine” through the App it will make a lot more sense to you.
No you do not! I have some folders on my mac excluded from the backups because they take up a lot of space and I do not care if they get wiped. (Video samples Etc)
Yes but I do not recommend this! SSDs have a limited amount of times you can write to the disk. The problem with that is that Time Machine backups will do a lot of rewriting and drastically reduce the life of the drive. If you are looking at making the backups faster you need to consider backing up more often. Because I back up every day my backups take less than a few minutes.
FAQ is not finished!
A good FAQ is never really finished! I am happy to answer more questions! Feel free to email me at info@macmason.tech