Time Machine is Apple’s solution for the everyday Mac customer. It’s easy to set up and use, and creates an excellent safety net for those who wish to back up their data to a locally-attached external hard drive.
Backup and Sync. Automatically back up photos from your Mac or PC, connected cameras and SD cards. Get the Google Photos app to back up and view photos on your.
On page 14 of his Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard review, John Siracusa talks about Time Machine (which debuted in 2007 with Leopard) and shares some (pre-Leopard) backup stats of Mac users based on a poll Apple took:
Eighty percent of Mac users said they knew they should back up their data. (This is scary already. Only 80 percent?) Twenty-six percent said they do back up their data. That actually doesn’t sound too bad until you get to the next question. Only four percent back up regularly. In a nutshell, this means that if you could snap your fingers and make one Mac user’s main hard drive disappear, there’s a 96 percent chance that you just destroyed files that are completely unrecoverable.
Welcome to Time Machine
Time Machine has lots of nice features. It is automatic, backing up every hour without any user intervention. By default, it will copy everything on your Mac — system files, applications, accounts, preferences, email messages, music, photos, movies, documents, and more.
The best part of Time Machine, however, is its ability to keep multiple copies of files. Any time a file is changed, Time Machine backs it up, making recovery of a specific version of a file fast and simple.
In practice, this means that if you added one sentence to a Pages document every day, at the end of the month, you’d be able to retrieve a copy reflecting each and every edit point.
It also means that if you delete a file or folder from your Mac, Time Machine will keep a copy around for a while, giving you a window of time in which it can be recovered.
Since Time Machine will do this until the hard drive it is using becomes full, we recommend dedicating an entire hard drive to it, and one that is at least twice the size of your internal disk. The bigger the drive, the deeper Time Machine’s archives can go.
Setting up Time Machine
Time Machine is incredibly easy to set up. Simply buy a hard drive and plug it into your Mac. Once you do, macOS will show this dialog box:
Once a drive is selected, Time Machine will begin its initial backup. Depending on the number of files on your computer and the type of drive you’re using, this could take several hours. But, since Time Machine only grabs changed files during subsequent backups, future backups should be much, much faster and hopefully will just happen without you even noticing.
By default, Time Machine backs up all files, but you can change this in System Preferences:
If you’re setting up a Time Capsule, be sure to check out this article on Apple’s support site for more information.
Using Time Machine
Time Machine is designed to run every hour. If your Mac is asleep or misses a backup for some reason, it will begin to work again as soon as it can. In short, as long as the Mac can see your Time Machine hard drive, it will take care of backing up for you.
Time Machine is controlled from a simple menu bar application:
The drop-down gives information about the most recent backup, and can be used to pause the application if a backup is currently being created.
While in the early days Time Machine was a resource hog, on modern Macs, there’s no real performance hit when the application is running.
Recovering files with Time Machine
Recovering a file from a Time Machine backup is brilliantly easy. Simply navigate to the Time Machine icon in your Mac’s menu bar and select “Enter Time Machine,” which will bring up this interface:
You can navigate to the folder your file was in with the Finder window, but the real magic takes place with the slider on the right side of the screen. Scrubbing over it with the cursor shows the dates and times of available backups. Recovering something that was accidentally deleted from your Documents folder is as easy as navigating to that folder and going back until reaching a point in time before the file was deleted.
(The same technique can be used if you wish to recover an older version of a file that is still present on your Mac.)
Once you’re done, click the “Restore” button to copy the file from the backup drive and return it to your Mac’s main drive. If a document exists in the directory with the same name, macOS will ask you what it should do.
If you reformat or replace your Mac, Setup Assistant can be used to copy all (or some) data from a Time Machine drive. Simply have the drive plugged in at first boot, and the OS will walk you through restoring your files.
Beyond Time Machine
There’s no reason not to keep a Time Machine backup. It’s easy to set up and maintain, and external hard drives are cheap. That said, it’s not the only option out there. If you’re looking to beef up your backups, check out these articles:
Apple surprised everyone by removing the App Store from iTunes 12.7. So users no longer have the capability to sync apps to their iPhone or iPad using iTunes.
This is not an issue for most users who download apps directly from their iPhone or iPad, but for those who rely on iTunes to manage their iOS apps, it’s going to be a problem. Syncing apps using iTunes came in handy to users with a limited internet bandwidth or those who owned multiple iOS devices. It can also come in handy to install apps that are no longer available in the App Store.
While you can downgrade from iTunes 12.7 to iTunes 12.6, the process is not as straightforward. Luckily, there’s third-party software that will allow you to install apps onto iPhone or iPad without using iTunes. iMazing is powerful iOS device manager that has a data extraction tool to backup, restore, and install apps onto your iOS device.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use iMazing to backup and install apps on your iPhone or iPad without iTunes. The best part is that you can backup selected apps and their data and restore them in the future.
How to Backup Apps on iPhone or iPad to Your Computer Without iTunes
Step 1: Download and install iMazing 2 on your computer using this link. (Don’t miss the 25% discount on iMazing 2 exclusively for iPhoneHacks readers)]
Step 2: Connect your iOS device to your computer and open iMazing.
Step 3: From the left sidebar, choose Apps.
Step 4: iMazing displays all the apps that are installed on your iPhone. Select the apps which you wish to backup to your computer. To select multiple apps, hold down the Shift key and click on the apps you’d like to select.
Step 5: Click on Manage Apps apps in the bottom, then select Extract App.
Step 6: A file browser is displayed. Browse to the folder where you want to extract the selected apps, then click on the Choose button. This will display a confirmation dialog box. Click OK.
Step 7: To backup the apps, iMazing first needs to refresh your current backup. Click on the Back Up Now.
Step 8: iMazing now begins to extract the selected apps to your computer. You can view the progress of the transfer in the Operations window. Once the transfer has been completed, you’ll find the apps in the folder that you selected in Step 6. They ‘ll have the .imazingapp file extension.
Most apps are relatively small, and only take a few seconds to copy. But some apps, notably games, can be a gigabyte or more, and may take a while to copy.
How to Install Apps to iPhone or iPad Without Using iTunes
Step 1: Connect your iOS device to your computer and open iMazing.
Step 2: From the left sidebar, choose Apps.
Step 3: Click on Manage Apps in the bottom, then select Restore App.
Step 4: A file browser is displayed. Browse and select the .imazingapp or .ipa files that you’d like to install on your iOS device.
- Note: if you choose a .imazingapp file, then make sure that the app is already installed on your device otherwise iMazing won’t be able to restore its content and data.
Step 6: A confirmation message is displayed. Click Continue to begin installing the selected apps onto your device.
Step 7: The progress of the installation will be displayed in the Operations window. Once done, your device might be restarted.
This is how you can install apps on your iPhone or iPad without iTunes, as well as backup important apps and their data. If you face any issues, do let us know in the comments below.
Note: While the trial version of iMazing allows you to transfer only a limited number of items as you can see in the table below, backing up and restoring apps is not limited.
Dataset | No of items |
---|---|
File Transfer | 100 |
Media | 50 |
Photos | 50 |
Messages | 10 |
Contacts | 10 |
Call History | 5 |
Notes | 5 |
Voicemail | 1 |
Voice Memos | 3 |
Extract/Edit backup files | 10 |
You can buy the single computer license of iMazing for Mac or PC $39.99, the Universal license for $49.99, or the Family license for 5 computers for $69.99 if you want to remove these restrictions.
iMazing 2:Download link (Don’t miss the 25% discount on iMazing 2 exclusively for iPhoneHacks readers)
Let us know if iMazing is a good workaround to backup and install apps on your iPhone and iPad without iTunes.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links which mean that we may receive a commission if you click a link and make a purchase. Thank you for your support!