You can find instructions for that here. But for now, we’ll be looking at how to reset your MacBook Air from the boot screen on your device. Once you’ve finished your backup, make sure to safely eject your drive from your MacBook Air before unplugging the drive.Īlternatively, you can also choose to download macOS Mojave from the Mac App Store on your device, creating a bootable USB drive from the download file. If you want to control what is and isn’t being backed up, hit the Options button inside System Preferences in the Time Machine menu (If this is your first time doing a Time Machine backup, it may take a while).

Choose Back Up Now from your Time Machine menu.Select Use Disk this will save your hard drive as a time machine backup drive.Click on Select Backup Disk and choose your external hard drive.

Plug your external drive into your computer and open the Time Machine application on your Mac (this is accessible either through Launchpad or in System Preferences).

Apple offers the AirPort Time Capsule, built specifically for Time Machine backups.Īlternatively, there are plenty of 1 and 2 terabyte drives on Amazon under $100, and if you’re looking for a recommendation, check out the Western Digital MyPassport drive or the Seagate Backup Plus drive, which are designed to work with macOS directly out of the box. If you don’t have a dedicated external hard drive, it’s a great time to pick one up. Time Machine and an external hard drive will allow you to back up all of your documents, applications, and other important information. Others, like resetting SMC and NVRAM, are no longer needed on the latest Macs.Apple makes it really easy to back up your data on your MacBook Air. Some of the more advanced options, like Verbose mode, are now hidden away.

Target Disk Mode: go to the Recovery menu and select Share Disk.

Set a Default Startup Disk: select your disk as above, then hold down the Option key and click Always Use.

Startup Manager: all your bootable disks will be displayed in the startup options screen, so just pick the one you want.

Safe Mode: select a volume, hold the Shift key, and click Continue in Safe Mode.

This will launch the macOS recovery mode, from where you can access some of the other boot modes, including:

Power on your Mac and keep holding the power button until you see the startup options screen.

Instead of starting your computer and holding down certain key combinations, you access the options in a different way:

The startup options for M1 and M2-based Macs have changed. The Mac startup keys listed below refer mostly to Intel-based Macs.

How to clear startup disk on mac air