Back up your Mac in Catalina

As we use our Macs for so much – work, entertainment, creative projects and managing our household budgets, etc – they soon get filled up with files and documents. And however robust and impervious to common viruses and malware our Macs appear, a computer can never be completely infallible, so it makes sense to regularly back up your files in case of a catastrophe. Luckily, any Mac running macOS 10.5 or above comes with a very reliable backup tool called Time Machine.

Time Machine can be set up to automatically run in the background so that it continuously saves copies of your important files – all you need is an external hard drive with sufficient storage to hold the contents of your Mac hard drive. Once set up, Time Machine will back up all of your data and documents without you having to invest any more effort. What’s more, if your external storage device runs out of space then Time Machine will erase the oldest versions of your files to create space for the newest versions.

Over the following pages we will help you get acquainted with Time Machine and provide handy hints on how to reduce the size of your backups