Help using external hard drive

[Jessica08]

I purchased the My Passport For Mac over the weekend to get all my data backed up before I buy a new Mini or fix my old one. Anyway, I recently downloaded the new OS, but I have no idea how to use an external hard drive like this. My old one was a Clickfree device that backed up everything automatically. All I did was plug it in.

Can someone please tell me how to get stuff saved? I know it's copy and paste, but that's about the extent of my knowledge.

Is there a way that everytime I plug it in it saves any new data or music or pictures without me having to manually do it?

I am going to set up Time Machine after I figure this out. Thanks!

 

[Evren Carven]

Yeah, you can set the external hard drive as backup disk, time machine will backup all your files automatically when you plug it in.

 

[CoastalOR]

Here are some instructions from Apple:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

 

[Ebenezum]

If your data is important might be a good idea to purchase additional drive and make a clone of your Mac.

Clone is exact duplicate of your Macs content, compared to Time Machine it has some benefits:

1. Restoring all data is much faster.
2. You can boot from clone and use Mac normally in case of drive failure (if you do remember to make another clone!)
3. Potential bug in Time Machine (while rare such things are not unheard of) won't effect clone because its made with different software.

You can make clone with Disk Utility or commercial software such as SuperDuper (basic version is free) and Carbon Copy Cloner (demo version works for 30 days).