Do I Really Need to Backup my Mac?

This question generally comes into the mind of every Mac users. Do I really need to backup?? Yes guys, its the most important part that we usually avoid. If you won't take backup, one day you will surely face the worst possible situation that will be impossible to avoid.  Backup ensures you that your data is safe even if your Mac gets corrupt, hard drive failure, you accidentally delete some data, power failure, or any other severe problem.

Why Apple is providing a free utility “Time Machine”. It saves users from critical conditions of data loss. I found Time Machine the best feature provided by Apple, and the easiest way to take backup. Then why not to take advantage of free utility provided by Apple.

How to Backup Using Time Machine

It’s advised to take backup on an external hard drive, so that you can recover data from it in case of any corruption. So, attach an external hard drive to your Mac having sufficient blank space.

• Go to 'Apple icon' at the top left corner of the screen.
• Go to System Preferences > Time machine.
• Initially it remain in OFF mode, make it ON.
• It will ask you to select a destination drive, select the external drive you attached.
• Now select the source drive that you want to be backed up.

Now time machine will start taking backup of you drive. Another important feature of Time Machine is, it take incremental backup i.e. Every time you make any change to you data, it gets changed in backup as well.

Apart from Time Machine Mac also have another option of taking backup, i.e. Disk Utility

Backup Using Disk Utility

Disk utility creates a clone of your drive and saves it on another drive as a backup.

• Go to 'GO' in Menu Bar.
• Select Applications > Utility > Disk Utility.
• Click on the main hard drive icon, then click Restore.
• Select the source drive, drag it and drop to the Source.
• Select the destination drive, drag it and drop to the Destination. Prefer to select an external drive as the destination drive.

This process can be used to create the clone of any drive except the one you are using to boot your Mac. In order to make clone of your whole Mac including boot drive, you need to take the help of cloning software like Stellar Drive Clone. The software can create clone as well as image of your hard drive. The best part of this software is that you can use the clone created by software to boot your Mac as well in case your boot drive fail.