In brief, Time Machine offers an excellent solution for periodical backups and an efficient answer to the question on “how to backup Mac to an external hard drive”. Doesn’t comes with any extra features if that is something that you’re looking for.Easy to use and built by Apple themselves.This can be either an external hard drive or a flash drive. The app can be set to create hourly backups covering the past 24 hours, daily backups containing the past month, and weekly backups consisting of files older than a month.īackups can be created and stored to any external storage device that you plug into your Mac. This app creates incremental backups in what is possibly the simplest solution to create a backup hard drive Mac in a periodical manner. Time Machine backup is a software application, which is part of macOS. Time Machine (Free, Comes Installed on Mac)
The backup features of Disk Drill are free as well and won’t cost you any money.Ģ.
Overall, Disk Drill is one of the best Mac backup software solutions available – as it is efficient, fast, portable, comprehensive and easy to use. Not as easy to use as Time Machine which is discussed next.
Does not come installed as part of macOS, requires a download.Modern and powerful interface that is easy to use.Comes with extra tools that come in handy.When used together with Byte-to-byte backup, it can recover data from logically damaged drives. Data Recovery In case the worst happens, Disk Drill is also a data recovery tool with a high success rate.File shredder securely obliterates any data on the disk… Forever. File Shredder If you’re backing up a drive to sell or give away, deleting your data and even formatting your drive still leaves a chance to recover that data.Gauranteed Recovery Backs up entire files that were sent to the Trash folder, so this setting guarantees a 100% successful recovery (but takes up way more space).Recovery Vault Automatically backs up the metadata of deleted files, which greatly increases recovery rate in case you lose your data.Byte-to-byte backup Byte-to-byte backup is an image-based backup feature, which makes it super comprehensive as well as compatible with standard apps.In addition, the app can scan computer drives in search of missing files which is some of the best data recovery tools out there if you ask me. The first is simply an extra layer to the recycle bin, and the second keeps a copy of any file moved to a pre-selected folder. This characteristic makes the copy very portable, as it allows for the image file to be opened by other Mac backup software available on the market.ĭisk Drill comes with other important data protection features, such as its Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery technologies. If the above method doesn’t work, you can force unmount the drive.The main advantage of Disk Drill over other similar apps is that it stores in truly standard formats. The Terminal command to unmount an external drive is shown next: diskutil unmount $DriveID To remount the drive, you require to unplug the drive and plug it again.īut you can easily unmount and remount your external hard drive using the Terminal command without the need to reconnect the storage device. In GUI, you need to plug the external hard drive into your Mac to mount it automatically while drag and drop the drive icon to Trash to eject or unmount it. Unmount or Mount External Drive Using Terminal The correct DriveID is required to manage your external hard drive using Terminal.
Please note down the external hard drive's identification a sample DriveID could be /dev/disk2. Alternatively, you can look for the external hard drive using the following command: ls /Volumes This command will return all the mounted or unmounted drives and their partitions. The command line to view the list of all your connected drives is as follows. The first thing you would like to do with your external drive is to view it using Terminal. The next sections describe commonly used Terminal commands and free Mac data recovery software to salvage your lost data. In that case, you can still recover your data using data recovery software. And suppose you didn’t back up your data and executed some unsafe commands that resulted in a data loss disaster. The backup ensures you can restore data in case of any data loss event. So, back up your Mac before using Terminal to avoid data loss due to the remove command's accidental use. But, Terminal won’t show any warning while executing any commands. The app will execute the requested command immediately. All you need to do is enter the required Terminal command, then hit Return. Terminal helps you manage your external hard drive far better than the GUI.