How do I back up my old Mac to an external hard drive?

I know they are links but what are they? They look scammy?

Carbon Copy Cloner was written by a former Apple employee. When he started it he was still employed by Apple, and made CCC available for free. When he left Apple to devote full time to CCC, he started charging for the product.

I have owned a CCC license for years, and it is my go to backup utility. I've even used it to backup my Mom's iMac to my NAS server, and Mom lived 300 miles away. It worked great.

SuperDuper! has been around longer than CCC, and I also have a license for SuperDuper! It has actually saved my bacon several times in the late 2000's when the Mac I was using kept trashing my boot disk. At that time, you could boot from a clone, and I just booted up the nightly SuperDuper backup, and continued working until I could use SuperDuper to copy my backup to the boot disk. I have a very fond place for SuperDuper in my heart.

I also still run SuperDuper, as well as Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine on my work Mac. I do not want a bug in one program to leave me without a proper backup, so I have 3 different backups going. After all, I have proved to myself over and over again that you can loose data if you do not have a proper backup.

Finally, any time you ask an experience Mac power user about backup utilities, Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper and Time Machine are almost always mentioned to the exclusion of anything else.

Feel free to search for any of those utilities either in the discussions.apple.com forums, or the internet in general.

Time Machine has been incorporated since OS X 10.6 "Leopard", so unless your Mac is more than a decade and a half old or so, use it.

Back up your files with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

Alkowal wrote:

omg...are you serious? Where do I even find those programs?

The blue text in the replies is a link. Click or tap on it. Links to using Time Machine, and to the two third-party apps have been provided in the previous replies posted in this thread.

If the order of the replies in this thread gets confusing, select Sort By: Oldest, as shown here:

How old is old? Are we taking about an Apple II, here?

If this is a Mac from this millennium, two options are Time Machine, and Disk Utility. There are others.

John Galt wrote:

Time Machine has been incorporated since OS X 10.6 "Leopard", so unless your Mac is more than a decade and a half old or so, use it.

A clarification: OS X 10.5 is Leopard, and OS X 10.6 is Snow Leopard.

And yes, use Time Machine, particularly where backups of ongoing work are required.

Alkowal wrote:

It is a Macbook(13-inch, Late 2009) operating on macOS High Sierra Version 10.13.6.

Then back it up using Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper! . (Time Machine makes a versioned, but non-bootable, backup. The other two programs make bootable clone backups. You can migrate from Time Machine backups or from bootable clone backups – either is preferable to migrating over Wi-Fi.)

Alkowal wrote:

Do you recommend updating my software on the computer before using Time Machine?

If that is a MacBook (13-inch, Late 2009) running macOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra), you have already updated the OS as far as you can. 10.13.6 was the final release of High Sierra, and that Mac is incompatible with Mojave (10.14.*) and higher.

Time Machine is already on your Mac. The other two are available from the vendor sites to which I linked.

Which of the three to use is your choice; but those are the three main backup utilities that people use on Macs. (Using Disk Utility as a backup program for an entire hard disk would not be my first choice.)

Alkowal wrote:

I know they are links but what are they? They look scammy?

They are well-regarded third-party backup tools.

If you are unclear or unsure or unwilling, use Time Machine. Time Machine is built in.

Fastest way to get started, would be Time Machine to an external disk. It is really easy to get working.

You can add additional backups over time, and you do not need to use just one.

Time Machine can also backup to multiple disks, rotating each hour to each disk provided, so loosing one disk means you have the other(s).