Back Up with Time Machine and an External Hard Drive

If something really bad happens to MacBook, you can lose all the files it contains. This includes music from the iTunes Store (you have to pay for it again if you want it back) along with other content such as applications you have downloaded. However, what is worse is losing data you create, such as your photos, movies, and documents. Much of this data simply cannot be replaced at any cost.

The way to minimize the risk of losing important data is to back it up consistently. The Mac OS X Time Machine application is designed to make it easy for you to do this so you can recover important files when you need to. All you need is an external hard drive on which to store your backups.