Your signal getting cut off, a cable getting detached, the power going off, or your computer crashing during a backup is all it could take to have big problems.
If your backups are really important and you need a much more stable system for doing backups either remotely, wirelessly, online or an external drive, then I describe the best way how to do this below.Ī hard drive used for Time Machine backups requires an HFS+ journaled partition which gets corrupted and unmountable very easily.
Browsing Time Machine history in the Time Machine viewer can be a bit laggy, but it does work. I've had to do two of them in the past few years on machines that keep their backups this way and both went smashingly well. I can confirm that complete restores from Time Machine backups kept in this manner work well. Or, and this is what I recommend, you can unattach the drive from your target and attach it via USB to your machine and do the restore over USB which is much faster.
If you have a complete disaster and need to do a fresh OS X install and recover from Time Machine you can point the recovery process at the remote drive and it will ask you to pick a sparsebundle from the drive to recover from. If you click on one, it should mount and you should be able to browse it like normal. These are the actual "disks" that Time Machine is using on each machine to keep the incrementals. If you browse this drive from the target machine you'll see sparsebundle files, one for each machine that's doing a Time Machine backup to this drive, on the disk. When Time Machine runs you'll see this drive appear as a mount on your system, and when it's done the mount will go away. You're now all set up to use this remote drive as your Time Machine backup location. Pick your encryption options and hit the Use Backup Disk button
If you are looking for something with USB-C to use with your MacBook, and nothing here suits your fancy, you can always check out the best USB-C hard drives for Mac to ensure you can use them on your Mac laptop with no dongle needed.Yes. A two-month membership to Adobe's Creative Cloud Photography Plan means it's the best external hard drive for Mac for budding photographers as well.
This program can help you wrangle your photo library if you don't already use some photo managing tool. Seagate also throws in a one-year complimentary subscription to Mylio Create. No matter how you back up your Mac, the Seagate Ultra Touch HDD has you covered.
The Seagate Ultra Touch HDD is the best external hard drive for your best Mac because you can carry it around with you at all times, it's formatted for both Mac and Windows right out of the box, and its easy-to-use software can automatically complete backups for you as often or as little as you want.
If you need blazing fast speeds for giant files, the Samsung X5 is a monster external SSD that can handle any workload.