If you have spent any time on a computer whatsoever you get familiar with “Undo”. This simple little command has saved me countless hours of having to recover work that accidentally was deleted, or I clicked on the wrong button etc. But what happens if you did something you needed to “undo” but did not find out for a few hours? Are you stuck?
Hopefully not! Check your TimeMachine Backup!
OSX has a neat backup utility called TimeMachine. This software backs up your entire computer every hour. All you need to do is connect a blank external hard drive that is at least double the size of the hard drive inside your Mac. The Time Machine backup will run every hour that the hard drive is plugged in and save it on the hard drive.
But what happens if you have not plugged in your hard drive to your Mac for a few days? (Bad Mac user BAD !! ) In later versions of OSX, your Macbook will save a 24 hour backup on your Mac.
A quick story of how I used this feature lately
As a computer, I’m always working on something. The other day I was working on a Python program and it was working great. What I did not know is that the change I made to the software sometime in the last day broke the program. Unfortunately, I have no idea when or where that happened. (You can only click “undo” so many times)
Being that I needed the software to work NOW for a project I was working on. I needed to restore from a backup. TimeMachine was the hero as it was able to restore the software to a date where I was working correctly.
10 min of restoring that one file saved me hours of debugging. TimeMachine like clicking “Undo” but yesterday!
If you need help learning how to back up your iMac
I can help you understand how to back up your Mac. How to use Time Machine. And how to avoid a disaster before it happens.