Learn How easy it is to Format (set-up) your external harddrive to start backuping your mac:

Open Disk Utility.( Look inside your Applications folder- is a folder called ‘Utilities’ – look inside  to find Disk Utility app)
The disk utility window looks like this:

Now, select your external drive from the list on left ( mine is the orange one in pic );

with your external drive selected- click the “Partition” tab,  now select  the “Volume Scheme” to “1 Partition.”**

Click “Options” and select “GUID Partition Table” (for Intel-based Macs) or “Apple Partition Map” (for PowerPCs).

Name  the drive (i use  LapBackup-so i know what it is:my laptop backup)

then  set the format to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).”

Apply the changes and confirm the actions.

NOW BACK THAT SH#T UP.

**in-case of a large external drive- -i have a 1 tera byte drive,which i use , with two partitions-one for  back-uping my desktop and one for  laptop – i set up two partitions- each  500 gb-

if you do choose more than one partition- just select one of the newly created partitions (essentially -each “partition” is it’s own hard-drive)

and format it as explained above-to use as your backup drive-