Questions about Time Machine

I am hoping that someone can help me have a better understanding of Time Machine and it's function. I attempted to set it up but received a message saying that there were no wireless devices detected. What am I doing wrong? I do not have any wireless devices so that makes sense. Is Time Machine only for wireless devices?

Time Machine is a backup utility. You need to have some sort of secondary drive, either attached directly or remotely via an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule, before you can enable it. If you only have a single drive in your system, you can't use Time Machine.

The best way to use Time Machine is to attach an external hard drive directly to your Mac.

Thank you. I understand it's purpose now. I was unsure as to what it was supposed to do exactly. I have no external drives as of yet so I don't need to bother with it for now. Thanks!

time machine

get one, you will never regret it, for me it has proved its worth in gold

This copy i made sums it up nicely Skitch.com > majorminor > DriveFail

Get the biggest drive you can and set time machine up, its totally worth it.

There has only been one time in my life I ever had a hard drive take a dump on me and luckily at the time my sister was dating a guy that had his own computer business and he recovered my data for me and installed the new drive for free but he's been out of the picture for years now so I think it's probably a good idea to get one. Also that was a PC. lol Maybe I have just been lucky? I always used to back up all my important stuff to disks but at this point it's just way too much data to do that. I'm talking about my PC now. But eventually my MBP will have tons of stuff on it as well and there is no way in heck I would ever pay 2,200 dollars for data recovery unless I had discovered the cure for cancer and it was on that drive. Mainly because I don't have that kind of money. lol

Anyone have a suggestion as to what kind of drive I should get? Also is hard drive failure super common with Macs? I assume there is always a chance of it with any device but since everyone is really stressing the importance of getting an external one that's why I'm asking and because I am new to Mac.

ImmortalBeloved said:

Anyone have a suggestion as to what kind of drive I should get? Also is hard drive failure super common with Macs? I assume there is always a chance of it with any device but since everyone is really stressing the importance of getting an external one that's why I'm asking and because I am new to Mac.

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Apple doesn't make their own hard drives. The buy them from the same manufacturers as other PC suppliers do. (A Mac is just a PC assembled by Apple.) You could take the hard drive out of your Mac, install it in any other PC, reformat it and install Windows on it. (and vice-versa)

As far as which external drive to get, unless your looking for something special, I would recommend whichever one is half price in this Sunday's newspaper circulars. Office Depot, Staples, Best Buy, Office Max, etc. Someone always has a sale on one almost every week.

Jaygray said:

Apple doesn't make their own hard drives. The buy them from the same manufacturers as other PC suppliers do. (A Mac is just a PC assembled by Apple.) You could take the hard drive out of your Mac, install it in any other PC, reformat it and install Windows on it. (and vice-versa)

As far as which external drive to get, unless your looking for something special, I would recommend whichever one is half price in this Sunday's newspaper circulars. Office Depot, Staples, Best Buy, Office Max, etc. Someone always has a sale on one almost every week.

Click to expand...

Ah...I didn't think about that however I did know that because of reading another thread so that should have entered my thinking but it did not. I do not need anything special. I would just want to back up in general and I assume there is a thread I can search for when I get a drive to help me out. Thanks!