Wilson Mar bio photo

Wilson Mar

Hello!

Calendar YouTube Github

LinkedIn

Backup Archival and Restore on Mac OSX

Save your life

US (English)   Norsk (Norwegian)   Español (Spanish)   Français (French)   Deutsch (German)   Italiano   Português   Estonian   اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ (Egypt Arabic)   Napali   中文 (简体) Chinese (Simplified)   日本語 Japanese   한국어 Korean

Overview

Save Disk Space - Archive

Get rid of system wallpaper files you will never use, and files for languages you’ll never learn.

You’ll likely to manage disk space eventually, regardless of how large the hard disk because pictures and movies take a lot of room. Move picture files you don’t need instantly to a USB backup drive or DVD disks that last a long time.

Backup Using Apple Time Machine

Making a copy of data (backup) of a computer is necessary because data can lost by a variety of ways at anytime.

Many have caught Ransomware which criminals require payment.

There is the 3-2-1 Rule recommended, which requires three copies of any piece of data, on two different media (on laptop and in a USB drive) with one offsite (such as iCloud).

The backups should occur automatically.

Apple has a built-in Time Machine for backup to an external USB hard drive. When it runs out of room, it deletes the oldest backups to make room for newer ones.

It takes incremental hourly backups for the last 24 hours on the same drive.

Overnight I want a daily fully backup so I can pick how the system looked on any given day in the past. Even when the Mac is in Power Nap mode.

Apple offers a AirPort Time Capsule drive. But I can get a 3TB USB drive for $200.

Drives nowdays are pre-formatted for the PC. So it can be read but not updated by a Mac because it’s formatted in NTFS. It needs to be formatted with the Mac OS Extended filesystem.

  1. In Applications > Utilities, launch Disk Utility.
  2. Locate the drive name from the left hand side of Disk Utility and click on it.
  3. Click on the Erase tab across the top.
  4. Next to Format: click the contextual menu
  5. Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
  6. Format to Mac Filesystem
  7. Name the drive if you want, the name can be changed at any point
  8. Click the Erase button and confirm again on the next pop-up window.

Make the USB drive a boot-up drive. http://osxdaily.com/2013/06/12/make-boot-os-x-mavericks-usb-install-drive/

Backblaze is a cloud vendor created by ex-Apple employees $5 per month.

I exclude from backup the temp folder, which is used to hold generated files before being loaded to my website.

Files I reference infrequently or no longer need I burn to a 3GB DVD before deleting them. Examples of this include:

  • logs from my web server.
  • Files from past customer projects I want off my laptop in case its stolen (I don't want the liability). Each DVD stores 3GB.
  • Video projects that are too big to store.

External USB Hard Drives

Most 500 GB USB drives are formatted with NTFS.

In the Drive Utility, Erase.

Choosing ‘MS-DOS File System’ (also known as FAT32) will make the drive compatible with both a Mac and Windows computer, since that is the same as formatting as FAT32 under Windows. But unlike Windows, OS X doesn’t put an artificial restriction limiting the creation of disks in FAT32 format bigger than 32GB. Also, the disk cannot hold a file any larger than 4GB (smaller than what a DVD can hold).

To make a drive compatible with a Mac, choose ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, also known as HFS+.

A Windows computer will not even be able to see what is on it. (unless MacDrive or similar program is installed on the PC.)

There is no formatting after Erase.

More on macOS

This is one of a series on macOS:

Backup Archival and Restore on Mac OSX was published on .