Hi guys, I am looking for an external hard drive or USB that can be used to backup my mac to time machine. It's my first time using it and I'm unsure how much space I would need etc.If it helps, my macbook is 128gb, space used is about 100gb.
Looking for suggestions for hard drives/ USBs for mac time machine backup, any help is appreciated thanks!
I had a time machine (that’s white box thing ). You can stick a laptop hdd in it so it doesn’t run too hot. Think I put in a 2tb
We have 500gb and 1tb Macs, 90% and 45% full respectively, and have 1.5tb and 2tb powered drives plugged in. You’d want at least double the capacity of the computer. More is nice if you want multiple generations of changing files.
Thanks! Really helpful
Any external HDD works well for Time Machine if you just have one Mac to backup. You plug it in, format it using Disk Utility, and Time Machine will automatically back up when you leave it plugged in/etc.
Alternatively if you want to get more sophisticated you could potentially do something over the network using your router or a dedicated NAS (that's what I do) but if it's just one Mac, and you want a simple solution, I think an external portable hard drive will do. If your Macbook is only 128gb, I'd say anything with at least 250gb storage will do - you might even want a portable external SSD given it won't be too expensive and will be significantly faster.
Thanks! Do you know if time machine replaces the current back up with a new one? or are there multiple backups within the HDD?
As far as I’m aware, it will backup the whole thing first, and then the changes, typically every hour (?). Ie if all you’re doing is working on the one document for a year, then you would have the original backup of the machine, and every version of your document over the past twelve months (simplistically speaking). It will tell you when it needs to start overwriting old backups.
Pretty much this. After the initial backup, it does incremental versions of files which have changed. It also means you can go back to previous versions as well. The marvellous thing about Time Machine is it can also rebuild the entire hard drive if needed (have done this before). It's not a strict 12 months though of versions but rather it depends on how much space you have/etc…
@jace88: Sorry, didn’t mean to mislead (about the 12 months) - just drawing a scenario. Yes time machine is an awesome utility. And yes, have also used it for a full system restore after I shot myself in the foot trying to install windows in a dual boot scenario and trashed the system.
A 1tb cheap good old fashion spinning external HDD will be fine for time machine use.