

A good rule of thumb is that your Time Machine drive should be 2-3 times the size of the hard drive or SSD drive your have in your Mac. For example, if you have a 1TB drive in your laptop and can only afford a 512GB SSD drive for Time Machine, you could fill up that Time Machine SSD pretty quickly. If you are tempted to get a smaller sized SSD because of the price, be aware that will mean fewer backups that Time Machine can store before the drive is full. And it’s unlikely that SSD performance is going to net you that much of a difference to make the still-premium price worthwhile. Time Machine backups and restores via an SSD will be faster than a regular hard drive, cumulatively, but there’s still a big difference in price between an SSD and a regular hard drive. The sort of performance specifications that might lead you get an SSD aren’t necessarily applicable to a backup system. You’re not using the Time Machine storage system as your primary boot drive. And you will have a very fast external drive, either way.īut it’s important to remember what you’re doing with a Time Machine backup: You’re backing up. With the prices dropping on SSDs, it’s more affordable than ever to buy an external USB SSD or even splurge and get a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2-based external SSD. They’re also not available in the same sort of huge capacities you can find for hard drives. SSDs are also considerably more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives, though they’ve gotten dramatically more affordable in recent years. SSDs are quieter and use less power than hard drives do. Really, upgrading your computer with an SSD is one of the more cost-effective ways to improve performance.
Time machine on mac ssd upgrade#
More new computers than ever are shipping with SSDs preinstalled, and they’ve also become a popular upgrade for people looking to keep their current systems working for a bit longer. Without any moving parts, SSDs are much faster than hard drives: Faster to boot, faster to launch applications and faster to open and save files. SSDs are built using memory cells instead of a physical hard drive. How does all that wear and tear on the hard drive affect reliability, especially on SSDs? But I've seen mine default to Internet Recovery when there was no Recovery HD available.As a result, Time Machine really works best when a hard drive is just left plugged in to the Mac it backs up continuously, throughout the day, as you make changes to your computer. Starting over with a new drive will generally mean no Recovery HD - at least until it's rebuilt during an OS update. And that of course includes being able to restore to a new drive from a Time Machine backup.Īlso - I've generally been using Internet Recovery instead of Recovery HD. It can boot as far as providing basic utilities like like Recovery HD or Internet Recovery (option-command-R or shift-command-option-R) can.


It has to be restored to a different drive to boot. The Time Machine backup doesn't necessarily boot like a bootable clone. Use the Restore from Time Machine option to wipe your Mac and restore it to the Time Machine backup of your choice. Release the keys when the Apple logo and a progress bar appear. Hold down Command-R while you turn on or restart your Mac.

If you're trying to restore your entire Mac from Time Machine, you'll need to boot Recovery Mode. If you're trying to boot your Time Machine backup, it will likely appear as "EFI". Release when a selection of startup disks appear. If you want to boot a different startup disk other than your Mac's internal hard drive, hold down the Option key while you turn on or restart your Mac. I've tried this out on my Time Machine backup drive and it didn't work, but that being said, it was formatted incorrectly. Apparently you can boot your Time Machine backup, if necessary.
