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How to Use Time Machine on a Mac Leopard 10.5

originated by:Andrew, Sondra C, Krystle, Jack Herrick (see all)

Time Machine is a very simple tool to use on your Mac. It backs up your whole hard drive onto an external hard drive. Once you set it up, it backs up your files as you work, saving you the hassle of remembering this task. Read on to find out how to use one.

edit Steps

1
Buy an external hard drive with a lot of storage space. Install it. You can also use a server, or any non-bootable volume formatted in Apple’s HFS Extended format, as long as the entire volume is dedicated to Time Machine.^[1]
- Check to see if the drive has a Master Boot Record partition (avoid it if possible). If so, you will need to format the drive, or else Time Machine may malfunction when 10MB of data is copied.^[2]
2

System Preferences

Open System Preferences. We are going to set up Time Machine.
3

Click on 'Time Machine'.
4

Notice a menu with a button that says, "Choose Backup Disk..." Click on it.
5

Look at the menu with your hard drive listed on it. Choose it and click on 'Use for Backup'.
- You can always come back to this point if you ever want to change where Time Machine saves the backups to.^[3]
6
Let it back up all of the information at first. This could take many hours, but the rest of the backups will happen behind what you're working on. You won't even notice.
7

Wait until it's finished. You should have a screen that looks similar to the picture on the right. Here, you can also select whether or not to show Time Machine in the menu bar. This has options like 'Back Up Now' and it also tells you when the next backup should take place.
- If you click the "Options" button, you can select files and folders that you don't want backed up.^[4]
8

Notice that in your Applications folder or on your dock, there should be an application that is called Time Machine. If you want to retrieve a file that you've deleted, you can open up the folder that the file was in and click Time Machine. You will get a vortex/space screen that shows all the backups ever made. You can scroll back in time to the spot where you last saw the file. Click the file and press restore.

edit Tips

Time Machine does not back up cache files or virtual machine documents created by Parallels and VMWare. These can be many gigs in size and one small change to the virtual machine (or simply booting it) would force Time Machine to backup the entire file. The only problem with this is that it is not made clear in the Apple-supplied documentation.

When you get a new Mac, you can transfer all of your files onto the new Mac, even if you have lost the old one. In the first few screens there will be a box that asks you if you want to use a backup drive. Find your drive and click ok (or something to that effect.) The download could take hours.

edit Warnings

When your external hard drive gets full, Time Machine will write over the oldest files backed up. You have a few options to prevent this: you can remove files you don't want, move your files to a larger backup drive, or reduce how far back the Time Machine reaches.^[5]
Avoid computer names with non-alphanumeric characters, as these can make backups "invisible" to Time Machine.^[6]
Modifying very large files, even to make very small changes, will cause Time Machine to store multiple copies and take up more space.^[7]
If you are concerned that that you may have problems with this, find someone more experienced to teach you or set time machine up for you.

edit Sources and Citations

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