Step by Step: Backing up Your Mac to an External Hard Drive With Time Machine
Mount an external hard drive on Mac Go to System Preferences > Disk Utility. Check that the external disk is listed in the left sidebar. Highlight your hard drive and select Mount. It should now appear under devices in the Finder.
Connecting the Drive. Plug the hard drive into the Mac using the cable that came with it. Most hard drives connect via USB, so you'll just need to plug the USB cable into an open port on your Mac. You'll typically find at least one USB port along each side of the Mac.
Either click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar or open the backup drive in Finder and select Enter Time Machine. Luckily, you don't need to connect an external drive for this since you backed up to an internal partition. Locate the item you want to retrieve and click Restore.
How to backup your Mac to iCloud
Now, follow the steps below and learn the fastest way to transfer files between two external hard drives.
You can boot it from a USB drive as long as it is partitioned properly and has the same version of your copy of OS X.
Use an external hard drive on a Macbook Air device Once you have an adapter, you can then connect the port of the latter to the port of your device. Macbook Air. You will then need to plug in the cord USB of your external hard drive into the corresponding port on the adapter of your device Macbook Air.
Choose File > Export > Export vCard or choose Edit > Select All to select all cards for export. Choose where you want to save the files, then click Save.
Back Up Your External Hard Drive to iCloud Navigate to Finder > iCloud Drive and log in with your Apple ID. Connect your external USB hard drive to Mac. Copy all the files and folders that you want to save in iCloud. Paste all the copied items in a new folder in your iCloud drive.
The primary purpose of a backup is to provide you with a copy of files in the event of a total system failure, sort of like a library archive. With an external storage drive, you can manually or automatically relocate data to it.
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