Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion initiates a sometimes useful, sometimes not feature: local backups. Called snapshots, this seems to be kicked off when your primary Mac is a laptop and the Time Machine backup is an external drive, so OS X Lion compensates for the potentially unavailable external disk by keeping an additional … Read More

Using the command line, you can enable a hidden feature in Time Machine that allows you to backup your Mac to a non-native Networked Attached Storage device or even Windows PC. Warning: this is an unsupported feature in Mac OS X and Time Machine, relying on this method to backup your data could be risky. … Read More

Time Machine is a very convenient backup solution for Mac users, but typically requires an external drive to backup to. If you’ve got a network with an extra Windows or Linux PC hanging around with tons of disk space, you can get Time Machine to backup to that computers excess disk space instead of an … Read More

Letting Time Machine run on a routine backup schedule is important, but there also times where you’ll want to initiate a backup yourself, like before installing system updates or major OS X upgrades. If you find yourself needing to initiate a manual Time Machine backup, you’ll be happy to know it is very easy to … Read More

If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon. There can be a variety of reasons the backups become delayed, and if you’re curious why this happens here are … Read More