Backup with limited time

[PanserJohan]

Hey! I've been a long time reader of this forum, only skimming the best advice for years. This time I have a problem, I did'nt find an answer to right away.

The battery on my Mac is dying, and it keeps refusing to get charged. I have now managed to get it charged to about 80%, which should last me about 40 - 50 min. I am going to buy an external hd today, to transfer my picture library, and my master thesis.
What is the quickest way to do this?
Do need to format The new ext. hd? (Do not have time for that).
Which hd's does not need formating?

Writing this akwardly on my ipad.

 

[benwiggy]

Do you not have the power cable? You don't really want to start anything if the computer will die in the middle of it.

Some external drives come formatted for Mac (HFS Extended, Journaled.) Cheaper drives will likely be formatted for PC, and you will need to format it for Mac if you want to use Time Machine.

You may want to consider buying a replacement battery. That will give your laptop a good new lease of life.
But dear God, please back up your masters thesis onto a flash drive or something immediately, if you haven't already.

 

[PanserJohan]

The machine is not responding when the charger is put in, and the battery goes empty after 30min. I've bought a ext. toshiba 1tb hd, and pluged it in. I then chose to activate timemachine, and I'm running the backup now.

My question now is; when the backup is complete, is everything ok? Can I now buy a new machine and my data is safe and can be restored?

 

[benwiggy]

Assuming the Mac has successfully and correctly made a TM archive, then yes, when you first switch on a new Mac, it will ask if you want to transfer data from another Mac's TM backup.