I wanted to complete clear all the gunk from my hard drive and start over. I simply left the info on the hard drive for safety sake. You have a copy of all of your data on your external drive and you can access it in the future to drag and drop old files Once the computer has completed the process of backing up your data, it’s safe. Because whatever isn't saved in this process will be deleted. WARNING! (8.) Whichever folder you choose Time Machine not to include, will likely be gone forever. This will be your safety drive when/if you want things after your reformat.

In a few seconds, your computer will start backing up all of the contents (minus what you selected in options) to the external hard drive.Click the Time Machine ON/OFF button to On.Find the folder containing what you don’t want. Click on Options. Then click on the + symbol. If you want to speed it up and there’s junk on your computer you don’t want to save that have big file sizes like music or videos you can have Time Machine ignore them. Your Macbook should hold about 300GB (some more depending on your hard drive space).Under Available Disks, click on your external hard drive.Click on the small icon for Time Machine up in the taskbar.When you see the drive pop up on the home screen, you’ve got your place that will store your backup ready.Turn on Macbook Pro and external hard drive.So we need to back it up first and foremost. You want to be sure you don’t have a colossal meltdown and lose everything on your old Macbook Pro. Time: 60 minutes (depending on size of your hard drive and transfer speed.)įirst thing is first. If your computer crashes, you can go back to what it was like an hour before the crash. Time Machine is a backup software that will back up your Mac’s contents every few hours and retain it for hours, weeks and even months on the drive that you specify. All Macs these days come with Time Machine built into the operating system. If you’ve collected all the items needed to reformat your Macbook Pro in the last post, then you’re ready to get started with the first step: back up Macbook Pro with Time Machine. You can always refer back to the table of contents to follow the entire process.

Note: This post is part of the the series: Reformat Macbook Pro to make brand new.

How to reformat macbook pro 2012