Back Up and Archive Your Mac's Data

Complete instructions for copying music, movies, and videos from your iPod to your Mac, using OS X Lion and iTunes 10 or later.

Verify Time Machine Backups: If you happen to use a Time Capsule as the backup destination for your Time Machine backups, you can have Time Machine verify that the most recent backup was completed successfully, without any errors that would cause you grief down the road.

Time Machine and FileVault User Accounts: I've started to use FileVault to encrypt my user account on my Mac. I've noticed that since turning on FileVault, Time Machine no longer seems to be running any of its backups. Can Time Machine be used to back up FileVault-protected user accounts?

Time Machine uses a compelling interface to restore files and folders. But what happens when the file you want to restore is located within a backed-up FileVault image? The answer is that individual files and folders in an encrypted FileVault image are locked away and cannot be accessed using Time Machine. But Apple provides another application...

Moving Time Machine to a New Hard Drive: Starting with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x), Apple simplified what’s required to successfully transfer a Time Machine backup. If you follow the steps below, you can move your current Time Machine backup to a new disk. Time Machine will then have enough room to save a larger number of backups, until it...

Moving Time Machine to a New Hard Drive: Moving your Time Machine backup to a new hard drive under Leopard (OS X 10.5) requires that you make a clone of the existing Time Machine drive. You can use just about any of the popular cloning tools, including SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner. We’re going to use Apple’s Disk Utility to clone the Time...

Your Mac contains tons of personal data, from your saved emails to your calendar events. Backing up this data, whether just to have a backup on hand or to move the data to a new Mac, is actually pretty easy. The problem is it's not always an intuitive process. I ve gathered detailed instructions on moving this important info to your new Mac,...

Backups are one of the most important chores for all Mac users. This is especially true when you have a brand new Mac. Sure, we want to relish its newness, explore its capabilities. After all, it's brand new, what could go wrong? Well, it's a fundamental law of the universe, usually wrongly referenced to some guy named Murphy, But Murphy was...

Copying music and video files from your iPod to your Mac can be a bit harder than you may think. Follow the wrong process and you can easily find all your iPod files have been deleted; gone for good. This happens because iTunes will try to sync with your iPod when it's attached, ensuring your iPod matches the contents of your iTunes library.

How to Copy iPod Music to Your Mac: What? You don't have any backups, and you just accidentally deleted some of your favorite tunes and videos from your Mac? Well, all may not be lost, at least not if you've been keeping your iPod synced with your desktop iTunes library. If so, your iPod can serve as your backup.

You can easily transfer purchased content from your iPod to your Mac, using iTunes 7.3 or later. These step-by-step instructions will help you recover the purchased files from your iPod.

It's easy to copy media files, music, audio books, podcasts, movies, and videos from your iPod to your Mac. Focus on Macs shows you how.

You can create a replica of your startup disk that is not only an exact copy, but bootable as well. This is the ideal type of backup to perform before updating any system software.

A step-by-step guide to configuring Time Machine on your Mac.