Best External Hard Drive For Mac Time Machine Backup
When you connect an external drive directly to your mac you might be asked if you want to use the drive to back up with time machine.
Best external hard drive for mac time machine backup. An encrypted backup is accessible only to users with the password. The my book desktop external hard drive from western digital while large fits the bill for business owners in need of serious space. If you want to make use of your mac s thunderbolt port then this is the best external hard drive for macs. It s also compatible with time machine for mac users though you may need to reformat.
It comes in 3 4 6 8 or 10tb varieties and offers western digital s own backup solution for windows users. Make sure that the usb drive is formatted for time machine. If you have a mac pro or another system that you ve. Fortunately time machine can back up any locally connected drive although apple configures it by default to excludes external drives.
Time machine can back up to an external usb drive connected to an airport extreme base station 802 11ac model or airport time capsule. The drive can be used for automatic time machine backups on your mac but you can also use the mirror option in the toolkit app to automatically back up individual folders so that they re always. Connect the drive to a usb port on your airport base station then turn it on. Select encrypt backup disk recommended then click use as backup disk.
Even though mac computers are capable of reading hard drives that are formatted for windows if you intend on using your external hdd as a bootable disk or want to use it to backup files with your mac s time machine you must format it to be entirely mac compatible. Best buy customers often prefer the following products when searching for time machine backup external drives. It provides twice the speeds of standard usb 3 0 drives. External hard drives are not only useful for storing data but are an excellent way to transport files from one location to another.
When you take into account price ease of use and portability the seagate backup plus slim is the most reliable hard drive you can carry around with you at all times. Learn more about keeping your backup disk secure. The first time you plug in an external drive time.