How to set up Time Machine in Mountain Lion
If you value your data—whether it’s some perfect photos you took last weekend, your entire music collection on iTunes, or your draft of the next great American novel—you must stay on top of regular system backup. One of the easiest ways of doing so is to use OS X’s built-in backup program, Time Machine. Time Machine works with your Mac and an external drive to save important documents, photos, and system files regularly. Apart from keeping spares of every file, Time Machine maintains a record of how your system looked on any given day, so you can easily put everything back the way it was if something goes wrong.
OS X has included Time Machine since OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Here’s how to get set up in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) using an external drive. For more tips on backing up your data, see "Backup basics" and "Bulletproof backups."
Step 1: Select an external drive
To ensure that you have room for multiple versions of files, select an external drive that's at least two times bigger than your Mac’s hard drive. To determine how large your Mac’s hard drive is, select it in the Finder and press Command-I. If your drive capacity is 999GB, for example, you’ll be best off with a backup drive that’s 2TB or larger.
The best type of backup drive to use depends on the type of Mac you have. If you have a Mac with Thunderbolt, select a drive that’s Thunderbolt-ready, to take advantage of its speed. The options for Macs without Thunderbolt are FireWire- and USB-compatible drives. Though USB 3.0 and FireWire provide equivalent performance, Apple’s latest MacBook Pro release lacks a FireWire port, which suggests that Apple may be phasing FireWire out of its designs. Consequently, a USB 3.0 drive may remain compatible with future Macs longer.
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http://www.macworld.com/article/1164963/mac_basics_how_to_set_up_time_machine.html
