1. Backup Software Mac
2. Best Backup For Mac Computer
3. Best Backup System For Mac

To see storage information about your Mac, click the Apple menu in the top-left of your screen. Choose About This Mac and click the Storage tab. For Time Machine backups, it's good to use a drive that has at least twice the storage capacity of your Mac. With Backblaze you can back up your Mac for $6 a month, data is stored in secure data centres and two-factor authentication adds an extra level of security. If you’d like to keep files synced between a desktop and laptop, expand your storage, or have a bootable backup copy of your system, there’s a hidden feature in Disk Utility that makes it easy. Generally, booting from an external drive will be slower, even with new Thunderbolt and USB-C drives. However, a local backup is still vulnerable to things like fire, flooding, and theft. If your house burns down with your Mac inside, your backup drive isn’t likely to survive either. A bootable clone is like a local backup but, instead of just storing a copy of your files, it stores a copy of your whole operating system.

You see it happen all the time.

Bill: Oh man, you look panicked. What happened?
Stephen: My hard drive failed Monday night. I lost everything. Pictures, emails, my resume…
Bill: You didn’t have it backed up?
Stephen: Nope.

Most of the time people aren’t prepared for their hard drive to fail, and most of the time they lose everything. To avoid being the next Stephen, follow the steps below to back up your computer.

Buy a Backup Hard Drive

One of the difficulties of making backups is that those backups take up a lot of space on your computer. In order to have enough room to back up your computer, you might want to buy an external hard drive. Don’t worry though, an external hard drive on Amazon.com with one terabyte of space runs for less than $100.00. To give you an idea of the massive size of a one terabyte hard drive consider this: a one terabyte hard drive will hold up to 200,000 pictures or up to 250,000 songs. Here are a couple of places you can buy an external hard drive for a good price:

Backup a Windows 7 Computer

Here’s how to back up your Windows 7 computer.

1. Plug-in your external hard drive to your computer.
2. Double click on Computer. A list of drives will open up in a separate window.
3. Right-click on your main hard drive and click “Properties”.
4. Click the “Tools” tab at the top.
5. Click “Back up now…”.
6. Under the window “Back up or restore your files” click “Set up backup”.
7. Click your backup drive in the “Select where you want to save your backup” window and click Next. If you have an external hard drive you would select that here.
8. Windows will ask what you want to back up. Picking “Let Windows choose” will work fine for most people. If you prefer more control you can choose your folders by picking “Let me choose”.
9. Under “How often do you want to back up?” schedule the backup frequency. For someone who’s files are a matter of life or death you can schedule for every day. For others, once a week should suffice.
10. Click “OK” and your first back up should begin. You may notice the first backup takes a long time. Don’t worry because after the first backup Windows will only backup files that have changed and will be much faster. Once you see your first backup start you are good to go.

Backup a Mac OS X Computer

Here’s how to back up your Mac OS X computer.

1. Plug in your external hard drive to your computer.
2. A popup will appear asking if you want to use this backup with time machine. Click “Use as Backup Disk”. If for some reason a popup doesn’t open go to System Preferences >> Time Machine and click “Select Disk…” to choose your external hard drive.
3. That’s it. Time Machine will now take hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the last month, and weekly backups until your external hard drive is full. When this happens Time Machine will start deleting your oldest backups to make room for new ones. Also, just like Windows, the first backup may take a while, but subsequent backups will be much faster.

*Note: Time Machine does offer some options for customizing your backups. If you want to exclude files or include an additional hard drive go to System Preferences >> Time Machine and click “Options”.

I know some people have operating systems other than Windows 7 and Mac OS X. Here is an article to help you if you have a different operating system.

Do you have any other tips to help people backup their files? Have you ever lost everything to a failed hard drive? Let us know in the comments.

Backup Software Mac

Resources

Best Backup For Mac Computer

How to Use Backup and Restore in Windows 7
Mac 101: Time Machine
How to Backup and Restore Your Mac Using Time Machine

Best Backup System For Mac

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