Time machine is built in to Snow Leopard and is a great utility to help you automatically backup your computer. Once Time Machine is setup, it will schedule backups and perform these backups in the background while you work without any additional actions on your part. You will need another hard drive, and we recommend either a large external drive or a network Attached Storage device. The NAS is a great option if you have multiple computers on the network.
Time machine will use all of the space it can on the drive, so if you plan on using the drive for other computers, make sure you partition the drive and allocate the new partition for Time Machine backups. Once the external storage device is ready, click the Time Machine icon toggle the switch to turn Time Machine on. You will then see a list of drives you can select to serve as your backup space. Select the one you want to use and click the “Use For Backup” button.
You can access the different versions of a document and restore them by going through the Time Machine menu and selecting Enter Time machine. Once you find the version or the backup you are looking for, click the “restore” button in the lower right corner of the screen.
As with any backup scheme, you should make sure you have a third copy of your documents at an off site location. This could simply be using another hard drive or flash drive to copy over crucial documents, pictures and movies so you can store them in a place away from the computer and the Time machine backup location. This way, in the event of a disaster, you can at least recover your most treasured documents.
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