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When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
If I backup everything on my Macbook using Time Machine and an external hard drive would it be possible for me to hard reset my macbook so that their is nothing left on it and still be able to easily access those old files? I was reading online that time machine will delete old backups so I was wondering if I would lose all my files the next time i connect the external hard drive.
MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15
parminder00 Said:
"Time Machine Backup: If I backup everything on my Macbook using Time Machine and an external hard drive would it be possible for me to hard reset my macbook so that their is nothing left on it and still be able to easily access those old files?[...]"
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Recover Using Migration Assistant:
Yes. Once formatted, use Migration Assistant to import this data. But beware that if your builtin hard drive is set as encrypted, then you may not be able to restore these files in the future, should you use another internal hard drive. So, decide whether or not to encrypt the format. Also, use APFS for the format type.
Time Machine Backup:
Important: Create a Time Machine backup of your Mac, so that you can have something to restore your Mac from, should anything go wrong.
parminder00 Said:
"Time Machine Backup: If I backup everything on my Macbook using Time Machine and an external hard drive would it be possible for me to hard reset my macbook so that their is nothing left on it and still be able to easily access those old files?[...]"
-------
Recover Using Migration Assistant:
Yes. Once formatted, use Migration Assistant to import this data. But beware that if your builtin hard drive is set as encrypted, then you may not be able to restore these files in the future, should you use another internal hard drive. So, decide whether or not to encrypt the format. Also, use APFS for the format type.
Time Machine Backup:
Important: Create a Time Machine backup of your Mac, so that you can have something to restore your Mac from, should anything go wrong.
Although you can access files from a Time Machine backup using Finder, it was designed to accessed via the Time Machine interface. Old backups are only deleted as part of the Time Machine process when there is not sufficient space on the backup drive for new backups.
If you elect to "reset" your Mac, you would normally use Migration Assistant to restore a Time Machine backup to that device.
Time Machine Backup
