Using Time Machine without Another Hardrive

Hey guys, this is Maads 101. As many of you know, if you go into Time Machine and you don't have an external hard drive, it's just going to say "Set up Time Machine". If you don't have an external hard drive, it might be very annoying, and you want to back up your computer. So, I know a very simple way to get around this, which is actually backing up your computer on your hard drive.

The first thing you need to do is make your computer—first, check if there's some free space. You can do that by clicking on Macintosh HD and pressing Command + I. You'll get a little window here, and you can just look at that. You want to see under "Available". Right now, I have a 200 gig hard drive. Well, it's actually 185.9 gigabytes, and I used around 30, around 40 gigabytes, so I have like 150 GB available. So, I have enough to make a backup drive.

To make a backup drive, which is going to be a separate hard drive, to do this, which means your computer thinks it has two hard drives but actually has one. What you do is you're going to open up Boot Camp. You can just find it using Spotlight, and Boot Camp is made so that way you can install Windows on your computer to have a separate hard drive for Windows. You can partition your disk, just install how much you want for your backup and how much you want for Mac OS X.

I know that it has a Windows sign, but we're going to take care of that later. So for now, I'm going to make it a 50/50 gig drive. I'm just going to drag that to 50 gig and you can divide it equally; you can do whatever you want. Once you're done picking whatever you want, you click "Partition" right there. Now this takes a couple of minutes, so I'm just going to do a cut here as it finishes.

Okay, now that it is done, Boot Camp is going to ask me to install a Windows disk so I can install Windows. By the way, you can't do this process if you already have Windows installed. So, I'm going to quit and install later, 'cause what we just wanted to do is partition our hard drive; we didn't actually want to install Windows.

Right now, if you want, you can rename this from Boot Camp to Backup Drive so you don’t get confused. I'll call that "Backup".

Okay, so now I can just open up Time Machine, and I can click "Set up Time Machine", which will open my System Preferences. First off, I want Time Machine to be checked on, and also, it doesn't know what disk it wants to save everything to, so I'm going to change the disk and I'm going to choose the backup disk. So, I'm going to have to use that from backup, but right now my backup disk is ready to have Windows installed on it, so it's going to have to change it from a Windows disk to a backup disk.

So, you're going to have to say you've selected the volume and then say "Erase", which is going to erase the file to make it a Windows disk. So that way, it can be a backup disk. This takes a little time, so I'm just going to do another cut here as it finishes.

Okay, so now that it is done, I have Time Machine all set up, and it says it'll do my next backup in 108 seconds. Or, if I have Time Machine shown in the menu bar, you can know if you have it because this little checkbox will be checked. I can just go to Time Machine and say "Back up now". Now it takes a little while to back up, because I already have 50 gigabytes on my computer.

So, 50 GB of content to back up, so I'm just going to do a cut here as it finishes backing up. Okay, well right now, I actually cancelled the backup because it took too long, and I have to do stuff afterwards. But, you probably know how to use Time Machine. I already have it set up. If you did all this, you have it set up; you just haven't had it backed up.

The farthest you can go is now back in time. So, all of these windows have nothing in them, but right now you have Time Machine set up, and you can back up whenever you choose to back up. Then you can go back into your regular computer.

Now let's say you choose you don't want to back up your computer anymore, and you don't want to—or like you buy an external hard drive and you don't want to back up on your hard drive. So you can turn off Time Machine. To do this, to get rid of this and to just get rid of it, first off, you're going to have to make it a Windows format disk again.

You can do that by opening up Disk Utility; you can find it in Spotlight. Now once you have this utility open, you're going to want to click on the drive that you want to change, and you're going to want to click up here where it says "Erase". Just click on that, and we're going to erase all the content on that, like things that we might have backed up and also like that. But right now, it is a Mac OS X disk, remember, and we wanted it to be an MS-DOS disk, which is what Windows runs.

So just go down there where it says MS-DOS, and you can call it whatever you want. You can just call it "MS-DOS". Then once you're done and you did all that, just click "Erase". It asks you if you want to erase to make sure; say yes or "Erase". It's going to prepare to erase the disk. It's going to disappear again for a second 'cause it's changing it and it leaves while it changes.

Now we're like when we were at the beginning of the video when we wanted to start, so we can just open up Spotlight. It'll take a little while, but there we go. Now we open up Boot Camp again.

Okay, so now we say "Continue" and we want to create or remove our Windows partition. In this case, we're going to remove it, so we say "Continue". We're going to make it so that way we have 100% on Mac OS X 'cause that's what I'm showing you how to do. So I click "Restore". It's going to ask you for your password, your administrator password. I'm just going to type that in, and there we go. Just hold on one second.

Then you can quit Boot Camp; you'll be all set like you were at the beginning of this video. So, yeah, thank you for watching, and have a nice day. Goodbye.