What is Time Machine?

A Beginner’s Guide to your Mac’s Built-In Backup Tool

If you’re a Mac user, you already have access to one of the simplest and most effective backup tools available: Time Machine. This built-in feature of macOS makes backing up your data easy, and best of all, it’s completely free.

What Is Time Machine?

Time Machine is a backup system that comes pre-installed with macOS. Unlike many third-party backup programs that require subscriptions or additional purchases, Time Machine is included with every Mac and is designed specifically for Apple systems.

Time Machine’s main job is to create incremental backups of your entire system, including apps, documents, system files, and settings. That means if you ever lose a file, experience a system crash, or upgrade to a new Mac, you can restore your entire system or just the files you need, right from your backup.

What Do You Need to Use Time Machine?

Getting started with Time Machine is incredibly simple. All you need is:

• An external hard drive that’s formatted for Mac (macOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS); if you need any advice on this, the Apple Store sells the appropriate hard drives.
• Ideally, the drive should be at least 1TB or larger, depending on how much data you want to back up and how long you want to keep the data backed up.

Once the drive is connected to your Mac, macOS will automatically ask if you want to use it for Time Machine. Click “Use as Backup Disk,” and you’re good to go!

In addition to external drives, certain network storage devices (like NAS drives that support Time Machine) can also be used for wireless backups. ¹

How Time Machine Works

Once set up, Time Machine quietly runs in the background, taking care of backups so you don’t have to. Here’s how it works:

• You can choose to exclude specific files or drives from the backup, if you don’t want everything backed up.

• You also have control over how often backups occur, though by default, Time Machine makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months.

Just leave your hard drive plugged in, and Time Machine handles the rest automatically.

Why is Time Machine helpful?

Accidents happen; files get deleted, hard drives fail, and updates go wrong. With Time Machine, you have peace of mind knowing your data is safe and easily restorable. Whether you’re recovering a single lost document or moving everything to a new Mac, Time Machine makes it as painless as possible.

How do I recover files with Time Machine?

If you’re looking to recover individual files or folders, simply use the Finder to navigate to where the missing item should be, and click the “Time Machine” icon in the Dock. Click the buttons or date strip down the side of your screen to go backwards/forwards in time. Once you’ve located the item, click once on it and then click the “Restore” button.

To restore your entire Mac, start it up in Recovery mode and use the Recovery Assistant to erase your computer. Then once you’ve re-installed macOS, select your Time Machine backup within the Migration Assistant to restore everything automatically.

To migrate everything to a new Mac, connect your Time Machine backup during the setup process and follow the on-screen prompts to restore everything automatically.

Time Machine and ClamXAV

Time Machine backups can only be modified by the macOS operating system.

This means that malware can’t install itself or run from a Time Machine backup, so it does not pose a threat if it is contained in your backup.

This also means ClamXAV can’t move or delete items from Time Machine backups, so ClamXAV doesn’t scan them; the backups are “frozen” until they’re either deleted or used to restore your computer.

Most importantly, if a backup with malware is used to restore your computer, once the restoration is complete, ClamXAV will detect and quarantine the malware, just like normal.

We at ClamXAV recommend performing regular backups for your computer, to make sure you don’t lose data.