A ccidentally saved the wrong edit of a crucial document? Time Machine! Spent hours on a Logic Pro project only for someone else to save an old version on top of it? You need Time Machine. Recovering messages you accidentally deleted? You need Time Machine.
Although Time Machine can store backups on your Mac, that’s not great from a disaster-proofing point of view; it’s best used to back up to an external drive, a networked drive or another Mac. As with any kind of backup, don’t put all your important eggs in one basket. Time Machine isn’t just a brilliant way of retracing your steps. It’s a very efficient backup app too; once you’ve set it up it happily runs in the background, making incremental backups every hour, every day and every week.
While your backups are best stored on external storage such as an external drive or SSD, Time Machine also stores snapshots on your local drive for 24 hours provided it’s formatted with the Apple File System (APFS). That’s been the default for Macs since the release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra, so even if you don’t have a backup drive you can use Time Machine to travel back and recover files, photos or folders.
Need to know:
Time Machine snapshots
If a backup drive isn’t available, Time Machine stores snapshots locally. They don’t officially use space on your Mac, so if your system needs more space it takes up it’ll delete the oldest ones; you can manually delete them by turning off Time Machine for a few minutes. To access them, just click the Time Machine icon in the Menu Bar and then Enter Time Machine.
5 best Time Machine alternatives
Time Machine is great, but it’s deliberately simple; while you can tell it to exclude specific folders and drives, that’s the extent of the customisation it offers. If you’re looking for something a bit more configurable, something you can use to clone entire drives or need to recover a damaged file and don’t use Time Machine, these apps are well worth considering.
Carbon Copy Cloner
› £34.45
The latest version of CCC is more customisable than ever. It’s great for the most demanding of users but also simple enough for beginners.
SuperDuper!
£28.51
SuperDuper!’s interface is distinctly old-school – but it’s essentially the Swiss Army knife of backup apps, with a comprehensive feature list.
