Backing up your Apple computer with Time Machine

Mac OS X comes with a nice feature called Time Machine, which you can use to backup pictures, documents and other files on your Mac computer.

Click System Preferences.

Click Time Machine.

Click Select Disk...

Now choose your back up storage device ...

I'm going to use an external USB drive named BACKUP, your disk will be called something else. Be sure you have enough space available on your backup disk.

... and click Use Backup Disk

The Time Machine is now turned on and ready to backup your Mac.

Countdown until the start of the backup has already started as you can see next to Next Backup. You can also see how much space is available on your drive and how much space will be needed in order to backup your Apple computer.

Now click Options...

You can also turn the Time Machine off if you don't want it to start with the backup after the countdown.

We're now going to add some exceptions, for which we don't want the Time Machine to create backups.

Click the + button (see picture).

And choose files or folders which you don't want to backup.

Hold CMD key if you want to choose more then one folder or file.

Click Exclude.

And the chosen locations are now in the exclude from backup list.

Click Save when you're done.

If you want to have an Time Machine icon in the menu bar the set the Show Time Machine status in menu bar option.

Don't forget to turn the Time Machine back in case you turned it off earlier.

When backing up will be in progress you will see a moving Time Machine icon in the menu bar (see picture).

That's really it, nothing to it, Time Machine will be making backups of your machine constantly. When your backup drive runs out of space, Time Machine will delete the oldest backups on that drive, to make room the new backups.

Click here for the How to restore the backed up data using Time Machine tutorial.