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

Things You'll Need

• Large-capacity hard drive

Connect to Your External or Internal Backup Drive

1. Hook up the USB or Firewire cables if you have an external drive.

2. If you have an internal drive, make sure it's connected properly.

3. Power up your computer and the external hard drive.

Use a Networked Drive With Time Machine

1. 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.

2. If you can't find your networked drive, click "Go" on the top menu and select "Connect to Server."

3. Type in the IP address of your networked drive and click "Connect."

4. 

   Open your Terminal ("Applications > Utilities") and type in the following without quotes: "defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1". This step is crucial, as it allows Time Machine to see and use a networked drive as a backup drive.

Set Up Time Machine

1. 

   Click on the Time Machine icon on the Doc in Mac OSX Leopard.

2. 

   Click on "Set Up Time Machine" when a window pops up that says "A storage device for Time Machine isn't set up."

3. 

   Click "On" or "Choose Backup Disk"; either one will work.

4. 

   Select the Hard Drive you want Time Machine to use and click "Use for Backup."

5. 

   Click "Options" to specify folders to exclude if you want.

6. Under the "Do Not Back Up" area, click on the plus sign (+) to add items to exclude from your backup.

7. 

   Select the folder or other items to exclude from Time Machine's backup and click "Exclude."

8. 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.

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.

Resources

• Nextag: Compare Terabyte Hard Drives
• Apple: Leopard Home