Hello and welcome to this Amsys Training Podcast about time machine.
My name’s Hugo and today I will be taking you through the 1st episode of a series of 3 about Time Machine in 10.8.
In this podcast we will be talking about:
- An overview of Time Machine
- How to setup Time Machine
- How to recover from Time Machine
- And some advance setups in both GUI and command line
What is Time Machine?
Time Machine is an Apple built-in backup solution, that backups your Mac to an external drive, Time Capsule or Mac Server with a single click.
Time Machine automatically backs up your entire Mac, including system files with the exemption of files in the trash, cache files and logs.
What makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on any given day.
Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups until your backup drive is full.
How to setup Time Machine!
Setting up Time Machine is as easy as connecting an external drive to your Mac via Thunderbolt, FireWire or USB if it’s mac OS Extended formatted .
If you haven’t specified a Time Machine backup device yet, Time Machine asks if you would like to use the disk for backups the first time you connect it.
You can also go to the Time Machine System preferences and select your backup destination from here, this will also be the place to go to select a second backup destination.
Local Snapshots
The Local snapshots feature lets your Mac use free space on your main drive to create iterative backups of your files when you’re away from your Time Machine backups.
By default, it’s disabled on all desktop Macs, because it should only need it if you are using a laptop, your desktop should always be connected to your Time Machine drive.
If you have more than 20% free on a laptop hard drive the local snapshots will start automatically. The backups are situated in an invisible file at the route of the System drive, (.MobileBackups).
After you have been away from your backup destination for 24 hours the system will start doing only one snapshot per day and if your disk reaches 80% full it will start deleting them and if you reach critical (90%) it will delete them with the highest priority, as these might cause a performance decrease while it’s doing so.
Exclusions
If you have parts of your drive, or full drives, that you want to exclude from your backups you can open the Time Machine system preferences and click Options and add them to the exclusion list.
If you decide to exclude the system files it will ask you if you want to exclude the system folder only, or all system files. If you select all system files it will also exclude all the invisible system files.
With this you can exclude areas of you drive or full drives but not specific file types.
I hope you enjoyed part 1 look out for part 2 coming soon
On behalf of Amsys, thank you for watching.