Time Machine backups for Mac

Macs at Williams are set up to use Time Machine as a backup solution.  Computer drives don’t fail often but it does happen and laptops can be damaged or stolen so having a backup in place is important.  Even if  most data is stored in your email, on a network drive (files1 or files2), or up on Google drive, there are likely files on your computer that are important to you.

For files that are on your laptop or iMac, for example files and folders on the desktop or in your Documents folder, our primary backup solution is an external backup drive that looks like this (The color may vary.):

       

Macs run a program called TimeMachine to back up files whenever this drive is plugged in to the computer.  On the desktop of the computer the backup drive will look similar to this:

To check whether your computer has backed up recently click the little clock symbol near the sound and time in the menu bar:

In this case the computer backed up completely at 9:11am today, which is good.

Please contact Client Services at [email protected] if

  • you do NOT have one of the blue backup drives (could be red, silver or black as well)
  • you do not see the little clock icon in your menu bar (this is just a setting you can change)
  • when you click on the clock icon the backup date is alarmingly in the past