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Part of securing your data is protecting it from loss through deletion, corruption, or equipment failure. Time Machine is a tool to back up and restore your files onto an external hard drive connected to your Mac. It uses a special space-themed interface to help you find a file that you have lost.

Time Machine has too many features to describe here. Instead, I'm going to head you to Apple's page on Time Machine.

Before you can use Time Machine, you need to set it up to work with an external hard drive. If you partitioned your external hard drive, then you can use one of the partitions. Your Time Machine partition should be at least 1.2 times the size of your hard drive but the larger the hard drive, the more archived data Time Machine can keep. (To find out the size of your internal hard drive, select it in the Finder and do a Command-I to get info.)

1. Go to System Preferences from the Dock or from the Apple menu.
2. Choose the Time Machine preference pane. If the padlock on the bottom left is locked, click it and enter your password.
3. Turn the big switch to "ON" and choose your Time Machine partition.

When you first start Time Machine it will back up your entire hard drive. That process can take an hour or more. After that it will make backups every half hour of your computer. These backups will only take a few minutes.

Notebook Mac Users: Time Machine needs to be constantly connected to the Mac to work properly, which doesn't work very well with notebooks. There is product from Apple called Time Capsule that contains an Airport wireless base station and a built in hard drive. With Time Capsule, Time Machine will automatically and wirelessly back up your notebook Mac when it is connected to your wireless connection. Time Capsule is also useful for backing up all the Macs in your house to one place using Time Machine.

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