You don’t want to miss anything important, so exercise care. You can halve that time by halving the amount of data to be backed up. The more data you need to back up, the longer it will take. Give Time Machine More of Your Mac’s System Resources

Back up to a Faster External Hard Drive.

Exclude Files and Folders that Don’t Need to Be Backed Up.

Delete Anything You Don’t Need Before the Backup.Spoiler: Our final tip promises the most significant speed boost-but in my tests, I didn’t see the speed gains it promised. You were surprised to learn that your initial backup can take many hours, and you haven’t got enough time to get it done before your Genius appointment.įortunately, there are various ways to speed up a Time Machine backup. You were instructed to back up your data first. However, there are times when you will want to minimize the time required by a backup.įor example, you may need to perform your first backup before taking it to be looked at by an Apple Genius. After the initial backup was finished, I never noticed when the incremental backups were performed again every hour. I use it to back up my iMac to an external hard drive.

The app keeps your files safe, allows you to restore them one at a time or in bulk, and can be used to set up a new computer. It’s designed to work quietly in the background you’ll probably never notice that it’s working. After the initial backup, Time Machine only has to deal with the files you created and edited. The app’s purpose is to make backup easy: you set it up, and then it works without you thinking about it. Time Machine is Apple’s computer backup system.

Backup mac to icloud vs time machine