What You Need To Know?

Before you begin using Time Machine, you need to have an external hard drive. Apple has an official external hard drive known as Time Capsule that is selling for $299 – $499, depending on whether you purchase a 500GB model or 1TB model. You can also use your own external hard drive.

Before purchasing or using the hard drive, you need to make sure it can be used for the space you want to backup. If it’s not large enough of a hard drive to accommodate your initial and additional storage, then you’ll have to go through the task of purchasing and setting up a new hard drive. To find out how large a folder is follow these steps:

1. Activate Finder
2. Just click “Command + I”.
3. Once on the page, you will then see how large your internal hard drive is. Your external hard drive must at least be this large to be able to hold your computer’s memory.

The Hard Drive and Your Mac

You have a couple of hook-up options with external hard drives and with Time Machine. Your first option is Thunderbolt, second being USB, and third is FireWire. To put it in a nutshell, Thunderbolt is the newest, USB is the most well known, and FireWire is the fastest. This will reflect in prices as well. USB hard drives are the cheapest while Thunderbolt and FireWire are the most expensive options. Your best option is to purchase a FireWire hard drive. Thunderbolt ports aren’t on all Macs and USB hard drives are a little too slow.

If you find that you don’t want to backup every single thing on your Mac, you have an option to choose what item should be backed up and what should not. This can be an option if your budget doesn’t allow you to get a hard drive that is large enough for your whole Mac. In addition, this will work if you only want to save documents and multimedia that you’ll keep for a long time, and not other miscellaneous stuff.

1. Activate Time Machine
2. Hook up your hard drive
3. Click on “Options”
4. To exclude a section to backup, click the “+” button

More on Setting Configuration

After you have hooked up your hard drive to your Mac, the Time Machine application will show up. You should click “Use as Backup Disk” to back up your computer appropriately. This box will come up every time you connect. You should remember though that the first time, will go without saying, will be a long one.

Any back up after that will be much shorter because you are adding to your initial backup. After the hard drive has been backed up, you are done! That’s the hardest and longest part of your whole backup. However, the length of time is also due to how much space will be added. There is a point when your hard drive will get full.

A Filled Time Machine: The Inevitable?

If you have backed up your files regularly, there will be a time when the external hard drive gets full. When this occurs, Time Machine will delete the oldest backup to fit the newest. However, if you’ve only had two backups and the second was of an astronomical size, you may not want to delete the information that you imported maybe just a week ago. In this case, it’s time for you to clean up your Mac and get rid of those useless stuff. Alternatively, it may be time for you to get a new and bigger hard drive.

Making Time Machine Work For You

You won’t get the most out of Time Machine if you don’t have it regularly back up your content. Especially with a laptop, it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to walk around with a big brick of a hard drive just hanging on your laptop. However, if you remember to continually hook up your hard drive, Time Machine will back up every time you hook up the hard drive. Thankfully, the icon at the menu bar will have an exclamation mark next to it to show when a backup is recommended. Heed those suggestions as soon as you can, because your content depends on it.

Conclusion

If you take anything away from this article, remember that there are many hard drive options. From Thunderbolt, to USB and FireWire in between, the options range in speeds and prices. It all depends on what you Mac can support based on compatibility and ports. Once you find the one for you, remember it can take quite a long time to back up your stuff, so plan accordingly. Once backed up, you can keep the hard drive hooked to your Mac, which will back up your stuff every hour, or you can hook it up ever so often to keep information freshly updated. A hard drive is an important piece of hardware for both novice and veteran computer users alike

Related Posts:

• How To Change Your Time Machine Backup Interval
• How to Restore Your iTunes Library with Your iPod, Flash Drives and CD’s
• How To Clean Up Your Mac’s Hard Drive
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How to Downgrade

Before you attempt to downgrade your OS, here are three possible scenarios. First is you have a backup of your Snow Leopard (via time machine). Second is you have no backup, but you have the Snow Leopard installer DVD. Third is you own a Macbook Air or a new Mac Mini.

Users with a Backup

If you are hardworking enough to always backup your system, then you are lucky. For those who have a Time Machine backup with the older OS on it, there is an option in the Lion’s Recovery HD that allows you to restore from an existing backup. All that you have to do is run your restore from that backup and your operating system will be send back to Snow Leopard without any problems at all.

Users with no backup, but have Snow Leopard installer Disk

If you do not have a backup, but you have the Snow Leopard Installer disk, the only way for you to downgrade is to re-install. Before you do that, remember to first backup your system, user data and all other important files to an external hard disk. DO NOT USE YOUR TIME MACHINE TO BACKUP YOUR SYSTEM. The reason is because after the downgrade and you restore from the Time Machine backup, it will un-done your downgrade and restore back to Lion again. If you don’t want to invest in hardware, you could probably use a cloud storage service for a few hours.

1. Begin by holding “Command + R” while you reboot. This will bring you to the Recovery HD.

2. Double click on the “Disk Utility” option from the “Utilities” menu.

3. Click on the “Erase” tab and then on “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and finally on the word “Erase”.

Now, you can install your disk and restart the system.

Macbook Air or New Mac Mini Owners

For proud owner of Macbook Air or the new Mac Mini that comes with the Lion installed, I am sorry, you are stuck with OSX Lion. Unlike Lion, Snow Leopard is not offered as a download on the App Store.

Enjoy your downgrading.

Related Posts:

• The Mac User’s Guide to Time Machine
• Get Many Of Lion’s Best Features On Snow Leopard
• How to Find Out If Your Favorite Apps and Programs Will Work on Lion
• Some OS X Lion Issues & How To Fix Them

You might think hourly backups are a bit excessive. Apple does not give you a convenient way to change the default backup schedule. Luckily this is easy. Here are two ways you can change the hourly backup schedule to one of your choosing.

Modifying the system files

If you just want to change the default interval and not schedule anything fancy, follow this method.

Warning: this tutorial involves modifying System files. As always, be sure to make copies of the original files before changing anything.

1. Navigate to

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

You’ll see a list of .plist files. Scroll until you see com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

2. Make a copy of this file somewhere else on your hard drive.

3. Verify that you (as an administrator of your machine) can Read and Write to this file. Highlight com.apple.backupd-auto.plist and “Get Info” (Command + I). If you don’t see “admin – Read & Write” or “[your username] Read & Write” you’ll need to add yourself to the list.

4. Open this file with a text editor. Property List Editor doesn’t let me save any changes for some reason.

5. In a text editor, find the lines

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>

Change 3600 to the amount of time you want between backups in seconds.

6. Save and you’re finished.

Time Machine Editor

Another way to manage your Time Machine backups is the very handy TimeMachineEditor utility. In addition to changing the default backup interval, it allows you to dictate your hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backup schedules with a very high level of detail.

Assign the rules you want and then click “Apply.”

TimeMachineEditor is free.

Do you have any other methods you use to increase Time Machine’s functionality? Leave them in the comments!

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• How to create your own OS X Dashboard Widgets from Safari
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Back in Time has the exact functionality of Timevault and Flyback. If you have used any of the two software, you won’t be remote to Back In time.

Installation

To get Back In Time to run in your system, you can either it using:

1. the deb package or
2. add the repository to your sources.list.

Installing via the repository

In your terminal,

gksu gedit /etc/sources.list

Add the following line to the end of the file. Save and close.

deb http://backintime.le-web.org/repository stable main

and then add the GPG key information:

wget http://backintime.le-web.org/repository/le-web.key
sudo apt-key add le-web.key

To install the the application for Gnome:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-common backintime-gnome

If you are using KDE 4.1 and above, use this command instead:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-common backintime-kde4

Usage

The first time you start the application, it will prompt you to configure your backup setting. There are mainly 4 main tabs (and 2 miscellaneous): General, Include, Exclude, Autoremove.

The General tab is where you select the folder to backup your files and schedule the interval for it to run the backup. It is advisable to pick a folder/drive/partition other than the one that you are going to back up.

The Include is where you define which folder/files are to be backed up. You will need root access to include system folders and files.

As opposite to the Include, the Exclude option is where you define which folders/files are not to be included in the backup.

The Autoremove allows you to decide how you want to deal with older backup files. You can choose to remove backups that are older than a period of time, or when the free space is less than a certain size.

When you are done with the settings, you will arrive at the main window. To start the back up, simply click the BackUp Now button.

Depending on the number of files/folders that you have specified for the backup, the backup time process can last from several minutes to hours. As soon as the backup is completed, the snapshot entry will appear on the left pane of the window.

To take a peek into the snapshot folder, simply highlight the respective snapshot entry on the left pane and the folders/files that it have backed up will show up on the right pane of the window. At any point of time, you can right-click on the backed up files and select Restore to restore your backup.

Conclusion

If you are already using Timevault or Flyback, there are no distinct differences in Back In Time that is worth your switch. However, if you are sourcing for a backup software with extra features, then Back in Time could just be the one for you.

Thanks to Vadim for notifying us about Back in Time. He is also the developer of the popular screen capture software: Shutter (previously known as GScrot).

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