How to Set Up Time Machine on Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard
Time Machine is a backup program that's included as a standard feature of Mac OSX Leopard. Once properly set up, Time Machine automatically backs up your computer periodically (also called "serial backups") and allows you to look through the past backups and retrieve older files or accidentally deleted files. This makes it very easy to maintain a proper backup routine.
Get your hands on the biggest hard drive you can afford (250 GB or greater--the bigger, the better) and follow these steps to set up your automatic backups with Time Machine.
- Difficulty:
- Moderately Easy
Instructions
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Connect to Your External or Internal Backup Drive
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Hook up the USB or Firewire cables if you have an external drive.
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If you have an internal drive, make sure it's connected properly.
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Power up your computer and the external hard drive.
Use a Networked Drive With Time Machine
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Open up your Finder. Click on "Go" in the top menu and select "Network" (or click "Shift+Command+K"). All available networked drives should be there.
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If you can't find your networked drive, click "Go" on the top menu and select "Connect to Server."
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Type in the IP address of your networked drive and click "Connect."
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Set Up Time Machine
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Under the "Do Not Back Up" area, click on the plus sign (+) to add items to exclude from your backup.
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Navigating through Time Machine's Backup
Time Machine will back up automatically in just a few minutes. Once Time Machine has performed its backup routine, when you click on "Time Machine" again, you'll be able to navigate through your backed-up files.
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Tips & Warnings
Get the biggest hard drive you can. We're in the era of readily available terabyte-capacity drives, and they're not all that expensive anymore.
Since most of your applications already have a backup of their own (CDs and DVDs), you can safely exclude them from your Time Machine backups.
Be careful in the Terminal and type only what you see in the last step above--that is, of course, unless you know what you're doing.
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Comments
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tincanpuller
Sep 19, 2009
To save space om my Macbook HD I assigned my itunes and iphoto library to an external HD. I use a second external HD for Time Machine only. How do I override the current Time Machine setting that excludes back-up of the first External HD so It can backup my tunes and photos? -
bcmasters81
Sep 16, 2008
What happens if you have already set up Time Machine on the disk in question, and THEN connect it to the Airport Extreme Base Station? I tried setting it up, but the "Disks" section doesn't show up. Why can't I see the disk?