The technology of external hard drives and connection ports is constantly changing which is why we’ve taken a closer look at the best external hard drive for Mac of 2018. The great thing for Mac users is that external HDDs have never been cheaper and storage sizes have never been bigger. A Step-by-Step Guide to Backing up Mac to an External Hard Drive. Note: the screenshots below are taken based on macOS 10.12.5 Sierra. If your Mac has High Sierra or an older version, differences may exist, but the process should look similar to what’s displayed below. Step 1: Connect your external hard drive.
If you read my previous post about, you know that I bought a 2TB Seagate Expansion external drive and managed to create two partitions on the disk — one for Mac backup purposes, and the other for personal use. In this article, I'm going to show you how to backup your Mac data to an external hard drive. You should backup your Mac on a regular basis, especially if you're planning to perform macOS updates. I did this several weeks ago while preparing my MacBook Pro for the High Sierra update.
You may also be interested in taking a look at I encountered during that process just in case you also want to upgrade your Mac to the latest macOS. Please note that the backup tool that I used is Time Machine, a built-in app provided by Apple. If you want to backup your Mac data without using Time Machine, there are also alternatives worth considering. Where is Time Machine on Mac? As I said, Time Machine is a built-in app within macOS ever since OS X 10.5.
To find it, click on the Apple logo on the top left corner of your screen, then select System Preferences. What does Time Machine Backup?
Time Machine is definitely the easiest way to backup Mac. In addition, the app is created and recommended by Apple. Once you have a timely backup, it's incredibly easy to restore all or part of your data in case of accidental deletion or a hard drive crash.
So, what kind of data does Time Machine backup? Photos, videos, documents, applications, system files, accounts, preferences, messages, you name it: They all can be backed up by Time Machine. You can then restore your data from a Time Machine snapshot. To do so, first open Finder, then Applications, and click on Time Machine to continue.
Be aware that the recovery process can be only be conducted when your Mac is bootable. A Step-by-Step Guide to Backing up Mac to an External Hard Drive Note: the screenshots below are taken based on macOS 10.12.5 Sierra. If your Mac has High Sierra or an older version, differences may exist, but the process should look similar to what’s displayed below. Step 1: Connect your external hard drive. First, use the USB cable (or USC-C cable if you're on a newest Mac model with ) that comes with your external drive to connect that drive to your Mac.
Once the disk icon shows up on your desktop (if it doesn't, open Finder Preferences General, and here make sure you've checked 'External disks' to let them show on the desktop), move on to Step 2. Step 5: Eject your external drive and unplug it. When the backup procedure is completed, don't rush to disconnect your device as this could cause potential disk problems. Instead, go back to the main desktop, locate the volume that your external hard drive represents, right-click and select Eject. Then, you can safely unplug the device and put it in a safe place.
One More Thing Like any other hardware device, an external hard drive will fail sooner or later. It is advisable to make a copy of the data on your external drive — as they say, a 'backup of your backups'! One good option is to use cloud storage services.
I now use, and I really like it because the app is so easy to use, and it also allows me to automatically. Backblaze and Carbonite are also popular options in the market, though I have yet to give them a try.
I hope you find this tutorial helpful. I can't emphasize enough the importance of data backup these days, especially when my mid-2012 MacBook hard drive died all of a sudden ? I've also seen cases where my friend's computer and hard drive failed. You can imagine their desperation. Without a proper backup, it's really hard to restore data.
Although you could try a third-party recovery program like and, chances are they won't get all your lost data back. Anyway, the main takeaway I want you to have from this article is this: Backup your Mac with Time Machine and create a second or third copy of those backups if you can.