Technology OK, no laughing...

[fab4fan]

If you're going to bust my chops, just move along.

I need someone to explain Time Machine to me. As in, I've never set it up, and yes I've had this Mac for almost three years.

I tried doing it on my own and I can't get it to work right. Obviously, I'm the problem, so I would appreciate anyone who knows how to do this giving me some tech support with a minimum of laughter.

TIA

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[deleted87716]

Mac 101: Time Machine
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427

 

[fab4fan]

OK. What is a Time Capsule? Is this going to involve me having to buy something to back up this laptop? Am I understanding that I need a disk plus something else? This is the one thing that irritates me with apple. They don't speak English, and they assume everyone speaks apple. I need an apple dictionary just to read that explanation. (Not that I'm complaining.)

In other news, I did successfully download my first movie without exploding anything.

 

[deleted87716]

OK. What is a Time Capsule? Is this going to involve me having to buy something to back up this laptop?

Yes, that's the easy way. Time Capsule is basically an Airport base station with a built-in hard drive for backup using Time Machine.

It's possible to connect a third-party external hard drive to an Airport Extreme and essentially do the same thing, but it adds additional complexity that I wouldn't recommend in this case. ;-)

http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/

If you just want to back up your laptop and don't need the real-time backup afforded by Time Machine, I suggest using an external hard drive and a disk-cloning backup program like Carbon Copy Cloner: http://www.bombich.com/ or SuperDuper: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html .

A really good backup strategy would use both Time Machine and periodic cloned backups.

 

[Slevin]

Yes, that's the easy way. Time Capsule is basically an Airport base station with a built-in hard drive for backup using Time Machine.

It's possible to connect a third-party external hard drive to an Airport Extreme and essentially do the same thing, but it adds additional complexity that I wouldn't recommend in this case. ;-)

http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/

If you just want to back up your laptop and don't need the real-time backup afforded by Time Machine, I suggest using an external hard drive and a disk-cloning backup program like Carbon Copy Cloner: http://www.bombich.com/ or SuperDuper: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html .

A really good backup strategy would use both Time Machine and periodic cloned backups.

I recommend SuperDuper, I've been using it for years

 

[fab4fan]

I think I need to go to the apple store.