1) Buy an external hard drive with a lot of storage space. Install it. You can also use a server, or any non-bootable volume formatted in Apple’s HFS Extended format, as long as the entire volume is dedicated to Time Machine

Check to see if the drive has a Master Boot Record partition (avoid it if possible). If so, you will need to format the drive, or else Time Machine may malfunction when 10MB of data is copied.

2) To begin setup, first click on the Apple menu then scroll down and click on System Preferences. Once the System Preferences pane is open locate the System row and click on the icon labeled Time Machine.

4) Look at the menu with your hard drive listed on it. Choose it and click on 'Use for Backup'.

You can always come back to this point if you ever want to change where Time Machine saves the backups to

5) Back up all of the information at first. This could take many hours, but the rest of the backups will happen behind what you're working on. You won't even notice.

6) Notice that in your Applications folder or on your dock, there should be an application that is called Time Machine If you want to retrieve a file that you've deleted, you can open up the folder that the file was in and click Time Machine. You will get a vortex/space screen that shows all the backups ever made. You can scroll back in time to the spot where you last saw the file. Click the file and press restore.