If I ever wiped out my hard drive, how would I get everything back using time machine?

Pondini's Time Machine FAQ

Start reading to learn.

Time Machine - 101 Tutorial

Apple OSX and Time Machine Tips

Migrate Time Machine backup to new Mac in Lion

Basic Backup

Get an external drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):

Carbon Copy Cloner

Data Backup

Deja Vu

SuperDuper!

Synk Pro

Tri-Backup

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.

Although you can buy a complete external drive system, you can also put one together if you are so inclined. It's relatively easy and only requires a Phillips head screwdriver (typically.) You can purchase hard drives separately. This gives you an opportunity to shop for the best prices on a hard drive of your choice. Reliable brands include Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Fujitsu. You can find reviews and benchmarks on many drives at Storage Review.

Enclosures for FireWire and USB are readily available. You can find only FireWire enclosures, only USB enclosures, and enclosures that feature multiple ports. I would stress getting enclosures that use the Oxford chipsets especially for Firewire drives (911, 921, 922, for example.) You can find enclosures at places such as;

Cool Drives

OWC

WiebeTech

Firewire Direct

California Drives

NewEgg

All you need do is remove a case cover, mount the hard drive in the enclosure and connect the cables, then re-attach the case cover. Usually the only tool required is a small or medium Phillips screwdriver.

Why? However, if you did, just reinstall the OS then migrate from your Time Machine backup. Such will be offered when you reinstall on a blank drive.

Yes. Expect that it will soon start complaining about lack of space though. Your Time Machine backup disk must be considerably larger than your source content.

To avoid confusion in the future, "memory" really isn't accurate terminology for hard disks or SSDs. "Storage" or "capacity" is more appropriate and will help others understand your questions 🙂

I'll add it to all the ones I owe him 🙂

You can use, for instance, a 500 GB Time Machine volume to back up a 1 TB volume. This will work until your actual content approaches (very approximately) 250 GB. As the TM backup nears its capacity it will inform you that it deleted its oldest files.

No matter what the TM backup must always keep, as a minimum, one complete copy of your existing content. In actual practice you need a TM backup of two to three times the size of the source volume.

At least that's what I learned from Kappy!

On my 500gb external drive I have 375gb of photos and a time machine backup from before I erased my hard drive and reinstalled the operating system. Would I want to delete the time machine backup files before making a new backup and then would I run into problems backing up more than 40gb of data onto the external drive?

... Would I want to delete the time machine backup files before making a new backup and then would I run into problems backing up more than 40gb of data onto the external drive?

Yes to both. You will run out of space quickly.

willowpc wrote:

On my 500gb external drive I have 375gb of photos and a time machine backup from before I erased my hard drive and reinstalled the operating system. Would I want to delete the time machine backup files before making a new backup and then would I run into problems backing up more than 40gb of data onto the external drive?

That depends on what version of OSX you're using, and how you put your data back.

If you're on Snow Leopard or later, and put your data back via a full system restore from your TM backups, or used Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant, Time Machine should figure out what happened and not do a new, full backup. Sometimes, especially on Snow Leopard, however, it doesn't. On Lion, there's a way to force it to "associate" the erased HD with the old backups, per the pink box in #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.