The built in program of Time Machine is not only an excellent and painless way of backing up your Mac, but also an easy way of moving your apps and data to a new Mac whenever you upgrade to a newer model. After the initial setup, time machine is ready to run. External Hard Drives are very inexpensive, so purchase one with plenty of space. Rule of thumb is to buy one with 1 1/2 or 2 times the size of the hard drive in your computer.
When you plug in an external drive, it may prompt you to use Time Machine. If it doesn’t ask, go to System Preferences – Time Machine and Select Disk.
Once Time Machine is set up, it will create and store one backup every hour for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and one backup a week for all previous months until it runs out of space. Once the backup drive is full, it will make room by deleting the oldest backups. In the set up, make sure there is a checkmark in the box next to Back Up Automatically.
Tip of the month
Passwords
Everyone is tired of having to come up with and remember numerous passwords. The fact is that the number of data breaches is up and in 2019 alone there were billions of email addresses and passwords that were leaked. There are two free services that will inform you if your email address has been leaked and what information has been broadcast.
One of them is HPI Identity Leak Checker. After entering your email address, you will receive an email and the report. The report will show a colorful chart displaying the information given out. For example, one site that showed up in my list was dropbox.com. A red square identified “Password” as having been illegally published elsewhere. However it displayed a date of September, 2012. If you are sure that you changed your password after that date, you are ok. Other possible categories are names, telephone number, credit card, bank account, social security.
The other service is HaveIBeenPwned. It basically gave the same information, but I found the format of the first service easier to read. They are free. Please take the time to investigate.