CHALLENGING TIME WITH TIME MACHINE

Time Machine: Smartest Application in Mac OS X.
What Apple states it: "Time Machine is a backup utility, not an archival utility, it is not intended as offline storage. Time Machine captures the most recent state of your data on your disk. As snapshots age, they are prioritized progressively lower compared to your more recent ones."
Using simple words, it can be stated as an application to back up files on your machine on the same or an external hard drive (USB or Firewire), which later on can be used to retrieve deleted or lost files.

When time machine starts it copies each and every file leaving the caches on your machine to the selected drive, which you can call as back up drive. It copies all the files in it oringnal state without compressing it, so that when required it could turn your Mac in its oringnal state. Time Machine keeps backing up files at regular intervals after the first back up that is termed as incremental backup, while doing this 'incremental/follow up' back ups it copies only those files that are changed since last back up. One any day when follow up back up is done it creates a link to the unchanged files in the drive so that if you try to retreive data on that day, you could access all the files and data as it was on that date.

Whats so unique about Time Machine?
1. Did you ever imagine of an application which can help your Mac machine getting backed up on a different machine in a network, well Time Machine lets you do this. If you want to know the process of setting up Time Machine in network go to the next heading "Ways to backup data on Network" or on Shared Hard Drive this article can help you.
2. Unlike other back up systems it not only stores the file in back up instead Time Machine has the capability to show exactly how your Mac looked on the selected date.
3. Another feature that makes Time Machine superior than others is its ability to stop & resume according to your Mac. For instance, if Time Machine is in the process to backing up the data and you need to turn your Mac off and leave for office or leave office for a weekend, here again like other back up system back up process will not be cancelled but Time Machine stops and goes to sleep and as soon as your Mac is turned back on, it resumes back up from the point it stopped.

Ways to backup data on Network
1. One by One: Buy an external hard drive, connect it to one machine & activate Time Machine. Once done, take that drive and connect to all the machines one by one and Time Machine is smart enough to create seperate backup for all machines. This seems to be quite hard way of doing the work, next is smarter method of doing the same work.
2. Connect the external hard drive to one Mac and use network file sharing to create back up on this external drive.
3. Going further, Mac has launched much smarter way of doing this by using Time Capsule, a specially designed wireless hardware for a hassle free back up.

Step by step process to back up:
Posting two videos here. First video is by about activating Time Machine on a Mac and the other one is retrieving lost files or restoring machine's orignal state in past.


Retrieving old files or machine's state

If you have any query, please let us know, we assure complete solution for the issue.
Some other useful sites for troubleshooting Mac are Macworld, Mac 101 & OS X Hints. Among which Mac 101 is managed by Apple.
The only condition is that you can use only those drives for backup which are supported by apple, to find the details of supported drives go to Apple. If in case you do not have one of such type, just don't worry, click here and you will get help with using unsupported drives with Time Machine- A great Search!