Time Machine Preferences Pane

Article, Mac OS X, Novice, Time Machine | March 6th, 2008

Time Machine is a great tool for automated backup, but sometimes the default settings might not be perfect for you. That’s where the Time Machine preferences pane comes in to play.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), an external hard drive

1. To navigate to the Time Machine preferences pane, click on the Apple symbol in the Menubar and click “System Preferences”
2. Next, click on the Time Machine icon in the System Preferences pane that appears.
3. Now you’ll see the Time Machine preferences pane. Here you’ll see information about your backups. You can also change some of Time Machine’s settings here. If you move the slider to the left, Time Machine’s backups will be turned off, back to the right and it will be turned back on. The check box to “Show Time Machine status in the menu bar” will enable or disable a Time Machine icon in the Menubar to the top right, by the clock. This menu is useful to quickly access some of Time Machine’s features.
4. One setting you can change is the disk that Time Machine backs up to. To do so, click the “Change Disk…” button.
5. In the selection box the drops down you will see all the available hard disk drives that you can use as back up drives. Select one and click the “Use for Backup” button to change the drive you want Time Machine to back up to.
6. The next setting you can change is the “Options…” button. This one is exceptionally useful as it lets you exclude certain folders from being backed up, such as your Applications folder.
7. As you can see, in this drop down window you can add and remove folders that you don’t want to back up. Use the plus and minus buttons to add or subtract folders. In addition, you can have Time Machine prompt you when old backups are going to be deleted. As Time Machine fills up your external hard drive it will have to compress and delete old backups. Once you click the “Done” button, your changes will be saved.

So there you have it, Mac OS X Leopard makes it very simple to manage your Time Machine backups.