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A video tutorial that outlines the basics of backing up your Mac with Time Machine, and restoring deleted files.
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0:05
hey everyone today I'm going to show you
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how you can easily back up your Mac
0:10
using Apple's pre-installed application
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called time machine now you might be
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asking what am I really gaining by
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backing up my computer well there's a
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lot of different reasons why you might
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want to back up your computer but the
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main one is file loss trust me it is not
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fun to lose all your files and it's it's
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not something you really want to
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experience at all it's it's just awful
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you'll lose all your applications photos
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music pictures everything like that and
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it's not fun trust me you want to back
0:41
up your computer so the first thing
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you're going need to do to back it up is
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obviously you're going to need an
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external hard drive of some type uh a
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lot of common ones are USB and you can
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just pick that up pretty much anywhere
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actually and uh even Walmart places like
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that you're just going to plug it into
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your computer that's all
1:00
now you're going to open up a new finder
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window next and from there you're going
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to need to go to your applications
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folder and from inside your applications
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folder you can just scroll over until
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you find system preferences and then you
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can open up system
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preferences now once you're in system
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preferences you're just going to click
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on the time machine icon and you're
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going to turn on time machine and all
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you have to do to do that is slide this
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big kind of slider here so just slide
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that and then you're going to hit select
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disc and from here you're going to see
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all the discs that you can use to use as
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a backup so I'm just going to choose
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this one called backup and click use for
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backup now it's going to tell me that I
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want to it wants me to erase the the uh
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drive because it's in incompatible
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format which a lot of them are
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so you're just going to want to click
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erase unless you have stuff on there
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that you want which in that case you're
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going to want to save that so I'm going
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to click
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erase and it only takes a couple seconds
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to
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erase so right here it tells you when
2:17
the next backup's going to be and that
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is in 90 seconds so once it does that
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it'll start backing up your entire the
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entire contents of your Mac and this is
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going to take a while so it's best to
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even do this over night or something
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like that because it's not something
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you're just going to want to sit and
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wait for to get done so just let it do
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its thing and you know come back in the
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morning or a couple hours later and it
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should be done and your entire Mac
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should be backed up with no
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problems so it's been all night you've
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backed up your entire computer and it's
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all good now uh what do you do with it
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now you know if you don't know what to
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do with it it's not going to be very
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useful so there's two main functions of
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time machine you can either rest store
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your computer to how it looked at
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previous date we're not going to get
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into that here it doesn't usually happen
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your computer usually doesn't just quit
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uh but the really nice feature of it is
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the ability to recover lost files so I'm
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going to show you how you're going to do
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that now so we have a new finder window
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open here and I'm going to accidentally
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delete something from my applications
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folder we'll delete this icon file here
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so we'll put it in the trash and we'll
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empty the trash so now that that icon
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file is gone what are we going to do
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well in our applications folder we're
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going to scroll over and find the time
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machine
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application and it's right there you're
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going to open it up now your desktop's
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going to slide down and it's pretty cool
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effect and now you're in this like space
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type of scenario and you can see all the
3:49
way back a list of all your how your Mac
3:53
looked every time I backed it up now I
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only have one back up here but normally
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you'd see a list flying all the way back
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and it would show you how your backups
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looked so on this side right here you
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can see all of your backups and you can
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click on any one of these if they were
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there and you just instantly fly to that
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date you can also achieve the same
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effect by clicking the arrows back and
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forth so in our current folder here you
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can see that that icon file is gone so
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if we go back to how our Mac looked
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before you can see this icon file is
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still here so what I can do is I select
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the file and all I have to do is go down
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to this corner right here and click
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restore and the time machine's going to
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slide out of the way and the file is
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just going to pretty much magically pop
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right back in your folder and it's
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pretty cool how it works it it's very
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seamless and it works very well and you
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can see our icon file is right back
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where we left it so that's pretty easy
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and it's kind of even just fun to play
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around with like restoring files just
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because of how cool it looks in my
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opinion uh so that's really all you need
4:58
to know to back up your computer with
5:00
time machine and I hope you found this
5:02
video helpful and hopefully it'll save
5:04
you some data down the road thank you
#Software Utilities