It also means you can rest assured that every new or modified file is being backed up, without you having to know what or where those files are. The great advantage of incremental backups is that they use far less space than just copying everything every time. It's able to determine this information thanks to some complex low-level technology using something called 'fsevents', though all most users need to know about this is that it works invisibly in the background. It works by initially making a byte-forbyte copy of your system to a secondary or external hard drive, including not just all your data and applications but also the system itself.Įvery subsequent backup that you perform or that is done automatically is incremental, meaning Time Machine only backs up files that have been added or modified since the last backup. You'll find Time Machine in your Mac's System Preferences if you're running OS X 10.5 or 10.6, with a large, friendly on/off button to activate or deactivate it. There are no complicated options, no fiddling and best of all, it works automatically.

It was a typically Apple-like approach to nudging users towards a certain way of working – in this case, backing up. To get started with this, click “File Services” in the left-hand sidebar of the NAS control panel.With OS X 10.5, Apple introduced Time Machine, an outwardly simple and straightforward backup tool tightly integrated into the system. Now that you’ve created the shared folder, you need to enable a couple of features so that Time Machine can successfully back up to it. Step Two: Enable Time Machine Access for the Share You’ll now see your new Time Machine shared folder in the list. You can create a new user specifically for the Time Machine backup with a different password and everything, but it’s not required. The defaults are pretty good, so you’re safe just going ahead and hitting the “OK” button. Next, you’ll set user permissions for the shared folder. On the next screen, hit the “Apply” button to confirm the settings. You can enter whatever you want, but I find this to be the sweet spot that includes a longer history of backups without getting too crazy on storage space. if your Mac has 250 GB of storage space, make the storage size 750 GB). This places a maximum capacity on the shared folder so that Time Machine doesn’t continue to create more and more backups until it fills up the entire NAS.īelow that, enter a storage size that’s about three times the size of your Mac’s storage capacity (e.g. Turn on the “Enable Shared Folder Quota” option. If you choose to do this, it’s better for your Synology NAS to handle it, rather than macOS, as that will free up resources on your computer.

On the next screen, you can enable encryption for your Time Machine backups if you want.

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