You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
Sorry this question is a bit naive but as far as backing up my new machine can I decide myself when to plug the drive in and backup, eg once a week, or does it have to remain connected to the laptop all the time?
MacBook Pro 13″, 10.15
You should connect your backup drive more often that once a week.
Time machine uses a system data structure called the File System Event Store to quickly create a list of changed folders. This shaves about four hours off the elapsed time of all but the very first backup. If the File System Event Store is stale (which it often will be after a few days without a backup), then Time machine must do a "deep traversal" -- look at every existing file backup date and compute what needs to be backed up from scratch.
Time machine is optimized to run at low priority in the background, without disrupting your important work. If you just let it run, it will finish a routine incremental backup in only a few minutes and quit. If it has to do a deep traversal instead, it will spend hours determining what has changed before copying any files.
You should connect your backup drive more often that once a week.
Time machine uses a system data structure called the File System Event Store to quickly create a list of changed folders. This shaves about four hours off the elapsed time of all but the very first backup. If the File System Event Store is stale (which it often will be after a few days without a backup), then Time machine must do a "deep traversal" -- look at every existing file backup date and compute what needs to be backed up from scratch.
Time machine is optimized to run at low priority in the background, without disrupting your important work. If you just let it run, it will finish a routine incremental backup in only a few minutes and quit. If it has to do a deep traversal instead, it will spend hours determining what has changed before copying any files.
Thank you for your reply. This is the sort of advice I was seeking and I will definitely backup more than once a week now that the first backup has been done.
You can connect it when you want. If you have automatic backups selected, it will back up hourly when the drive is connected.
Thank you for your reply.
Doing first backup to Seagate Backup Plus Drive on MacBook Pro 2020
