Backing up my Mac to an external drive

September 11, 2021 7:54 AM

I'm taking my MacBook in for service and I want to back up everything before I do. Mainly have a ton of Word files that I don't want to lose. Not much else. I have an external hard drive which I bought for some reason some years ago and have never used. Can anyone give me quick tips on how to do the back up? Is the time machine involved? Thanks.
posted by swheatie to Technology (10 answers total)

Assuming there's enough space on the external hard drive, Time Machine is the easiest way to do this. Otherwise you could just copy all the documents over manually. But Time Machine will give you a full backup, which will be very useful if the repair involves wiping the hard drive clean.

Just connect the external drive, format it if it tells you it needs to be formatted, then go into System Preferences, click on Time Machine, then select your external hard drive as the Time Machine drive. It'll take a little while for it to start backing things up, and then it'll take longer still, depending on how big the backup is, but you'll be able to see when it's done. I would just let it do its thing overnight.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:14 AM on September 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Time Machine is super-useful. Over the years, I've twice recovered crashed harddrives thanks to Time Machine. And Time Machine makes it easy to port your files to a new Mac. I use periodic backups rather than leaving the external drive connected all the time. (In my view, backups aren't backups unless they are disconnected from the original machine and stored in a separate location. But that's me.)
posted by SPrintF at 8:20 AM on September 11, 2021

Also make sure your external drive is formatted with the HFS+ filesystem:

Time Machine volumes must be HFS+ formatted, listed in Disk Utility as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:53 AM on September 11, 2021

That link about HFS+ pertains to older operating systems. If you’re running the current OS (Big Sur) this is the current guidance.
posted by theory at 9:16 AM on September 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

"I have an external hard drive which I bought for some reason some years ago and have never used"

That sounds risky. If you value your data, buy a new drive. You can even splurge for a SSD which will make your TimeMachine backups fast. TimeMachine gracefully handles multiple backup drives, so if you really value your data, back it up to 2 or more drives... Time machine will even remind you every 10 days if it hasn't been backed up to a particular drive, so you can leave one drive connected, the other in a safe place, and swap on a schedule.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 9:33 AM on September 11, 2021

I'd recommend you back it up twice, not once, and don't use an old drive. Externals can fail as well.
posted by cultureclash82 at 9:48 AM on September 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Word docs are small, so go ahead and put those on a thumb drive, or Dropbox/Google Drive/etc
posted by O9scar at 11:44 AM on September 11, 2021

Please use a solid state drive and do a search for Word docs and copy them to Google drive or some other stable, cloud-based solution. Here's a picture of failed drives in my office.
posted by mecran01 at 12:18 PM on September 11, 2021

Important documents that you don't want to lose you'll want to have backed up somewhere else in addition to the external HD. While I'd say that a hard drive that hasn't been used for "some years" could be very slightly more susceptible to failure, I don't think there's a problem with using it for backup if it does work. But having them backed up somewhere else as well (be that another drive or iCloud or whatever) before you take it in for service will help ensure that even if that hard drive fails, you won't be completely lost. It's always a good idea to make sure you have two viable backups to important data since all hardware will fail eventually and often unpredictably.
posted by Aleyn at 1:41 PM on September 11, 2021

Time Machine is good for making a backup of your drive that will (a) let you retrieve different versions of documents over time, assuming you leave it connected to your Mac, and (b) restoring a Mac from the backup.

An alternative for a single, complete, browsable copy of everything (or some things) on your Mac’s drive is SuperDuper, which has been around forever and does this very well.
posted by fabius at 5:18 AM on September 12, 2021